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Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#271

Post by fisherjeff »

C4stor wrote: post #160

Read the error messages. Reread them. Extract every piece of information from them. Never close an error popup without having read and understood what it means. Always read stack traces when you're blessed enough to have them. 100% of the juniors (and an awful lot of seniors) I've ever trained simply ignore those and then come ask for help debugging. 99% of the time, the explanation for their problem is literally the…

This is excellent advice, and I would suggest reading warnings (e.g., compiler warnings) as well – even if they don't indicate a problem, understanding why a warning is thrown is often a very worthwhile exercise.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#272

Post by TeMPOraL »

andy_wrote wrote: post #203
C4stor wrote: post #160

Read the error messages. Reread them. Extract every piece of information from them. Never close an error popup without having read and understood what it means. Always read stack traces when you're blessed enough to have them. 100% of the juniors (and an awful lot of seniors) I've ever trained simply ignore those and then come ask for help debugging. 99% of the time, the explanation for their problem is literally the…

I really like your last point "whatever the computer is telling is true from the computer point of view". In a surprising number of coding interviews that I've conducted, I've seen a candidate write an incorrect solution that generates an exception and then attempt to figure out the error almost on first principles, rather than actually reading the exception carefully and thinking about what coding errors could have…

In my experience, the progression of skill comes almost full circle. Juniors don't read error messages and try to debug "from first principles". Seniors pay attention to error messages. Experts often don't (initially) read the error message, because the very fact that there is an error immediately clues them in on its likely cause.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#273

Post by dkersten »

arandr0x wrote: post #130
fb03 wrote: post #76

do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…

Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol an…

Do what makes you happy, but don’t neglect your health (mental as well as physical) and take breaks/holidays. I spent too much of this year hating computers due to burnout and it’s extremely draining and depressing to have your primary passion leaving you feeling annoyed, frustrated and empty. It’s taken me pretty much all year (most of which I spent out of work) to get to the point where I can work without feeling too bad, but I still struggle to get any code written for passion projects despite having tons of ideas that excite me (until I sit down to work on them). It’s nuch easier to prevent the problems than to fix them after the fact.

In my personal experience, the way to prevent burnout for me is to have other hobbies, to stay physically healthy (especially to get enough sleep, but exercise and diet are super important too), to take plenty of holiday time, and to work on passion projects that are meaningful to you. Working on stuff to make someone else rich isn’t meaningful to me (especially when you see people getting burned by employers again and again — it’s rare that companies will return the favour)

Also, go easy on the coffee. Caffeine is a bad substitute for sleep.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#274

Post by jrowley »

spamizbad wrote: post #154

Treat people with respect. Sleep well. Take care of your body and your mental health. Try to turn any feelings of inadequacy or imposter syndrome into energy to push yourself forward and increase your skills and knowledge. We've all been there... multiple times. Learn to code fearlessly: Are you being asked to run queries on a production box? Ask if you can get a user with read-only permissions. Change crusty old cod…

This my favorite comment on this thread. Coding fearlessly is such a privilege/skill - makes a world of difference.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#275

Post by arandr0x »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #144
arandr0x wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol an…

You should try to do whatever makes you happy. If it makes you happy to give your labor away for free to some large profitable company, then by all means do so. I would personally try to use my time for myself (either to make more money or to do things I enjoy), but it's a personal choice after all. Only you can make that choice. That said, having balance is usually a good idea. If you have interests indepedent of yo…

I know that (I learned it at 25 though) but I don't regret being 19 and unbalanced. I had fun in the end. Suffering is a universal human experience and not something to be avoided at all costs or anything.

I mean, sometimes we give young people advice and they are super eager to do everything right and use all the lessons the older people learned. I figure, there may be value in learning that particular lesson on one's own and on one's own time.

The recent Tesla news are a good warning bell against never learning it, though. As was in a different way the recession.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#277

Post by dkersten »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #110
IloveHN84 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, plus do only 9-5 jobs. Do not work longer than 40hrs / week.

I think it can be okay to occasionally crunch for a few days at the end of a project. But yeah, you need to establish your boundaries now, to yourself at least. Do your homework, ask about expected overtime in the interview, and don't accept any offers that will expect 50+ hours/week on a regular basis.

It’s inportant to recognise that all overtime has a cost (both to you and the business). If I crunch this week, I typically lose more than I gained next week. I believe that Peopleware has a section on this.

Basically this means that crunch is fine to get out of a pinch, as long as it’s very infrequent and the cost is allowed for. Eg if there is an important deadline due this week, by all means, crunch to meet it, but next week is going to be unproductive and these tight deadlines cannot he a regular thing.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#279

Post by 52-6F-62 »

XorNot wrote: post #49

On the slightly more negative side: everything management tells you that's not in an email will have "never happened" when it's convenient. When you have a conversation with anyone where you think a plan was verbally agreed on, before doing anything your first action is to go back to your desk, write it in an email, send it to them as confirmation and find at least 1 other person, ideally in your reporting line, whic…

I understand a lot of people here have come from fortunate working relationships—

but in many fields things can be more competitive, or you can have new entries into your environment that will unexpected changes in the dynamic.

This is why early on many senior staffers most places I've worked lead with "COYA" when mentoring younger staffers. It's saved me more than once from bad actors.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#280

Post by vishnugupta »

I admit this is more of a laundry list than a single advice — as you are looking for the most important advice — I’ll nevertheless list them down. Roughly ordered by importance :-)

* You are expected to manage your career and growth. Don’t rely on or expect your manager or someone else to do that for you. You’ll get lots of good advises around how to grow in your career. It essentially boils down to taking initiative and driving those to closure.

* Understand the product end-to-end as an end-user. All the use cases, all the flows.

* Understand the business model, how it relates to the product and how that product (or part of it) in turn relates to what your team and you are working on. This is much harder than it sounds which is why you need to relentlessly pursue this. The code base you are working on has an abundant of domain knowledge and architectural decisions built into it. Build a mental model of both that domain knowledge as well that architecture. You will rarely find those documented so you need to put in a lot of effort to know all the use cases and relate them to control and data flows. Trace different requests through the system, use whatever tools that are at your disposal (debugger, logs, metrics etc.,). This mental model will really help you accurately estimate feature requests.

* Help those around you in whatever way you can. Treat all the functions (HR, finance, marketing etc.,) with equal respect. Get to know them, what they do on a daily basis, their pain points. If not to help them then at least to empathize with them.

* Actively look out for inefficiencies (e.g., build taking 20+ minutes, broken unit tests, chronic production issues) and take time out to fix them. Even if no-one appreciates this you will have at least a feeling of fulfillment of having achieved something valuable to the business/company. In the process, you will have learned something new.

* Make full use of vacation policy. No one’s going to tell you to take a vacation you gotta take care of your physical/mental health yourself.

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