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Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

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Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#11

Post by mcpeepants »

digitalsushi wrote: post #9

That 10,000 hours of work to master some process - that happens after 4 years of full time, salaried work, and after a quarter century, balloons towards 60,000 hours of doing this stuff. I never feel like I know very much, but as I start to notice grey hairs here and there, it occurs to me that I do know a lot of stuff. Broad stuff. None of it makes me a genius, and, I'm not a genius so the math works out. My junk dr…

Not patronizing, I think that's just empathy. Knowing that what you know isn't "known" just by being told. Otherwise you just end up dumping the contents of your 50 ft junk drawer (and your ego) on the floor of your open office space, and sure, maybe they sift through and find a few useful nicknacks to push them forward in their work. But they don't become better at discovering, collecting, or curating nicknacks.

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#12

Post by lukewrites »

Ask them to keep a written log of the stories they work on, and during “mentoring time” use it for things to talk about. (Why did you do this? What did you think would happen? Etc)

> Lead dev seems happy to not be involved in the process as they have worked together for quite a while without any substantial progress on the juniors side.

With the lead dev define what “progress” would look like as specific, measurable goals and then work towards those goals with the jr.

In the classroom a common technique is I Do (E.g. the jr watches you break down a story), We Do (break it down together), You Do (it’s all them, but you give support and feedback).

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#13

Post by afarrell »

One of the most important skills for a junior developer is the ability to ask good questions. As a lead, you're never going to be able to perfectly set them up with all the context they need for a task, so they're going to need to be able to get the bits that they're missing.

The best guide I've seen so far on how to do this is by Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#14

Post by emagdnim2100 »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #3

> 1) Make it their time 2) Mentor the whole person 3) Don’t give answers, provide strategies 4) Give homework 5) Don’t prevent all mistakes, just horrible ones 6) Don’t try to create a you-clone https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2014/01/07/how-to-be-a-mentor...

> 5) Don't prevent all mistakes, just horrible ones

I think this is critical, and engineers seem to struggle with it more than the average person. Remember your codebase is a business tool, not an art project. It's okay if some of your junior person's inelegant code ships as long as it works acceptably well. If you try to make every line exactly what you would have written, you'll drive yourself crazy.

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#15

Post by dangerface »

> I can lead him to be a better developer

You can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink, people are more stubborn than horses and will just act out if you try to lead them.

You should act as an example of how the junior should behave. If you want the junior to ask for advice when they need it and value that advice then you will have to demonstrate this.

Don't limit yourself to asking the lead or asking about things you don't know about. Valuing other peoples advice even when you don't need it is a sign of seniority not a sign of being incapable, it shows that you understand that improving your skills never stops and you can find improvement in anything.

When the junior asks you for your advice your job is to act as a sign post point them down the right path. Tell them warn them of gotchas and encourage them but don't carry them for the journey or spoil whats at the end, thats for them to figure out.

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#17

Post by macando »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #2

Intuition is built-up over time. I would try and carve out smaller, well-defined tasks for the individual. It may also be worth your company’s time and money to find some online training courses to target specific weak-points.

Intuition indeed. Nothing can replace a stream of several-hour long hyper-focused sessions of debugging bizarre multi-layer multi-language multi-concept bugs. The mind needs to expand and adjust to that.

Re: Ask HN: How to Guide a Junior Developer?

#18

Post by protonimitate »

> ... as they have worked together for quite a while without any substantial progress on the juniors side.

Seems like a misalignment on ability and expectations of the jr. What is "substantial" progress defined as? Was that definition shared with jr? It's hard to make progress towards something if that something is nebulous.

>He seems motivated to learn but has a bad intuition on how to do things the "right" way.

What is the "right" way in context? Is it the difference between a non-working and working a solution? Or is the difference between a sub-optimal solution and the best possible solution?

To me this sounds like an ideal jr hire. Eager to learn, and still green. This sounds ultimately like a case of poorly defined expectations.

What do you expect the responsibilities of the jr to look like in 6 months? A year? If you start there you can work backwards and help set smaller goals.

Without a strong idea of where you want them to end up, you're just asking them to "get good" which is bound to be frustrating for all parties.

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