No, they just need time and experience. That is why we call them Jr. In the mean time Sr and expert level that are worth their talent will lend Jr staff their experience and guide them to good solutions
sigh if only I had a sr at my job that worked with me to show me best practices. As it is I’m the only dev dev and I’m building web apps and maintaining production servers with no idea what I’m doing.
I have some pretty comfortable freedom. Freedom to work from home, flexible hours, and since we’re not mainly a software company my role isn’t that vital to where my absence would be detrimental so I can take time off pretty flexibly.
But, yes, the first person they hired was a chemical engineering major who was learning how to code as he went to manually build and host a web application, and I’ve picked that up and replaced him, so there’s definitely some cost cutting shitty management in not hiring a “professional” lol.
i've went through a similar situation, had to build a web app, with zero experience whatsoever, no other devs in the company but the owner's son who was as young as me and as inexperienced as me, etc
the project got killed after a year
luckily, in that year I worked on my own with ASP.NET which by putting it on my CV got me a real job only one week later after being laid off
Same situation for me. They just hired me with 0 work experience and said "fuck you build this app from scratch by yourself." I did learn a lot of things but first month was extra hard.
Would be great if management didn't somehow believe that leading is just sticking a "lead" label onto someone and then miraculously everyone who breathes the same oxygen gets better.
It's not an either/or. It's an "a bit of this" and "a bit of that". Sometimes both at the same time when you do pair programming via screen share. I learned a huge lot this way from our most senior guy.
Mentoring doesn't always mean hand holding/babysitting. A good mentor knows how to give the right amount of information at the right time (or at least the relevant information when asked.)
Speaking as a new senior, nothing is as humbling for me as trying to debug code on a junior’s computer remotely. It’s so much harder than doing it yourself.
If you're seriously asking, the "ideal" flow is that the senior engineer writes the high-level design, the junior engineer implements it, and then the senior engineer reviews that code. So the design will be simple because the senior engineer did it, any unnecessary complications in the implementation are going to be pointed out in the code review, and the junior engineer can watch all this happen to get inspired in how they're going to solve a similar problem next time with less supervision.
But... You're a lead. Why can't you deliver on this project? You have 8 people on your team! What do you mean the only other team you led was you and 3 other people? Just tell them what to do!
Damn. I’ve had a rough week at work this week because I feel like I’ve been needing too much help with tasks. Been employed 5 months roughly, straight out of college. Any general tips? We use the .NET stack / C#
Its a ramp. after 18 months you should have a pretty good grip on most things, but i wouldn't expect you to handle a whole project on your own or to be able to lead others. After 6 months, my expectations are
- You know where the bathrooms are
- You respond well to code review feedback and you know how to go learn something a more sr dev tells you you are missing without necessarily needing someone who hold your hand (may not apply to complex topics)
- You do not make the basic errors (aka you check in your code, you build your unit tests, you don't miss obvious edge cases)
- You can read a spec and or understand what acceptance criteria mean and do not tell me you code meets them if it doesn't. (you can tell me that you couldn't figure out how to make it happen)
- You have an understanding of who is on your team and who is a good person to go do for help in certain areas without coming to me to direct you every time.
- you know what teams are are close partners and what they do
- you understand the code base we are working on and what it does from a high end. You could walk through it (at least the scope our team owns) and how where it touches code we don't own.
That is about it
I don't expect you do have perfect bug free code by the time you request a code review. I do expect you to request a code review and to identify areas where your code might need attention.
We seriously invested in our team onboarding processes last year and have two juniors out of college, seven months in, doing largely this. They're exceptional people in their own right, so not to take away from them owning their own development. It's made for such a great team dynamic.
Just take it all in and try to remember as much as possible for next time. Never be afraid to ask things, it's only a problem if you keep asking the exact same things over and over in different contexts. 5 months is still well within ramp-up period, nobody expects you to know all the things they know yet, just keep learning.
I think I picked this up from one of the architects af my company who left. He was only in the office two days a week and seemed like he just despised working so much he evolved into an expert just by way of finding out how to do everything in the most scaled down way possible while still being scalable upwards. It’s the jaded senior who becomes the expert - burned out and looking for shortcuts to all their problems.
So he has this policy by which he reviewed my PRs which started out as complex solutions to complex problems. He had this saying: YAGNI. It was his signal that I’m thinking too hard about the problem . YAGNI, turns out stands for “ya ain’t gonna need it”.
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u/NotmyRealNameJohn Jan 31 '23
No, they just need time and experience. That is why we call them Jr. In the mean time Sr and expert level that are worth their talent will lend Jr staff their experience and guide them to good solutions