Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 460 posts

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

#321

Post by Z-Widwil »

hellogoodbyeeee wrote: post #122
kjullien wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could anyone explain this a little for me, please? Does this mean you save 93% of your income and only use 7%? From the website, there is a graph that shows how many years you supposedly have to save for retirement but it does not take into account the actual amount you make. As a "junior" dev, if you save 97% of X peanuts you still have peanuts.

The 7% is referring to the rate of return on your investments. He is making the assumption that if you invest $100 in the stock market on January 1, then on Dec 31 your account will have $107 in it. This assumption is an average over many years. There is a common rule of thumb in the investing world that you can safely remove 4% a year from your investments and they will continue to grow. (7% return minus 4% withdraw…

Quick question. Is the 80k an example you threw out, or a reasonable amount for a junior dev to make? Specifically for a a mid-sized company in the States, outside of Silicon Valley.

Currently working as a junior dev and the senior devs feel I'm making less than I should be. Which is much less than that 80k. The only caveat being that my employer is also paying for part of my tuition (up to a max of $5000 a year). Previously, this seemed like a decent increase with what I was making, but adding that 5k to my wage and I'm still nowhere near the 80k.

I'm throwing out this comment as it seems like it would be beneficial to other junior devs to have a ballpark amount to shoot for. Obviously other factors play into this (e.g. healthcare, location, etc). This just seems like a decent play to ask without breaking taboo with local devs.

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

#322

Post by arountheworld »

Don't agree to work for peanuts. Young developers are easy target for "startup" or predatory corporations as they can do mindless coding for hours and if you throw in free pizza on Fridays, they'll work day and night for almost nothing. Once you get burnt out you get replaced with another young wannabe developer. But you'll have damaged health and no savings. If offer is low and you think you'll get experience - you won't. Just look more for something that respects you.

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

#323

Post by azrael49 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #280

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…

> 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.

This is huge. For any junior devs, please take the time to learn about how to plan and enact career progression and technical growth. I learned the hard way that if you don't do this for yourself, nobody will.

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

#324

Post by asdffdsa321 »

arountheworld wrote: post #322

Don't agree to work for peanuts. Young developers are easy target for "startup" or predatory corporations as they can do mindless coding for hours and if you throw in free pizza on Fridays, they'll work day and night for almost nothing. Once you get burnt out you get replaced with another young wannabe developer. But you'll have damaged health and no savings. If offer is low and you think you'll get experience - you…

Nonstarter, obviously no one wants to work for peanuts, and it's easy for people with established careers to give that advice but not very useful for most younger people with little resources

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

#325

Post by svilen_dobrev »

billman wrote: post #58

Find a mentor. I was lucky enough to have a couple more experienced developers take me under their wing when I was new. I learned so much from them. This idea of mentorship has fallen out of favour, but I now understand "there is nothing new under the sun".

This. if u wanna become useful faster. Which will propel all else further.

"Languages are tools" too, thats my motto. Most things around are tools (house, insurance...) just people do not want to see it.

Find/invent a project of your own only, something thats seems doable and u would really use/need it, and try do it. Will teach u wonders.. about life as programmer.. which is not same as everybody else. Much more philosophy and multiminded-ness is involved.

As of how to find a mentor.. i do mentor people, and it seems a cross between a matter of luck, AND mutual "liking each other". You may have to ditch your ego, and the "i know it all"-ism for quite a while.. and believe me, its more useful to be scolded by someone in the know than to be awed by someone who does not.

good luck

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

#326

Post by azrael49 »

tomohawk wrote: post #23

Develop good habits: physical conditioning, mental conditioning, avoiding drugs and alcohol, etc. If you want to be doing this kind of work for the long haul, protect your body and mind. In your 20s, you can be a couch potato, etc, and probably do this job. In your 50s? The proportion of people still doing this job who don't take care of themselves is much smaller.

I would add on and say: don't underestimate the physical toll of having a job based on typing at a desk. Your back, hands, wrists, arms, hips, and probably more can take a big toll directly from performing your job. If you're not careful to avoid stress, burnout, etc, then you're also directly or indirectly inviting huge risk to your heart, weight, mental health, and more.

Drink lots of water. Go to the bathroom. Have little walks or stretches in the office, at least at your desk or in your chair. Go for a walk after dinner. Do some light exercises at home if you can't walk at home. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

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

#327

Post by codr4 »

fb03 wrote: post #85
atwebb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People vastly underestimate how easy it is to burn yourself out and how long or difficult it can be to recognize you've done it. Solid advice. I'd tack on finding a mentor who pushes back on you and has reasonable work/life balance expectations.

I sometimes find people that have mentors that have crappy work/life balance and they look up to them like they're some kind of superhumans. It's just like in japan when someone falls over a heap of work on premises at late hours, instead of lazy they think the guy is a 'trooper' for staying in for such a long time ("must be a strong person"). This has to stop.

My boss at my first gig was like that. Would always praise anyone who worked late or rushed in there to put out fires outside of work hours, he wasn't very interested in preventing fires but always first in line to play the hero role.

And on top of that he was severely dyslectic. I don't know, I feel like he would have made a better fire fighter.

Long story short, it took me two years to run into the wall like a freight train. This was 20 years ago, to this day I have serious issues with phone signals and stress in general. First sign of trouble and I simply shut down, can't do it any more.

Second that!

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

#328

Post by elsombrero »

debaserab2 wrote: post #315
scarface74 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only true if the developer of the class module let the entire stack trace get through to the consumer. In C# it’s the difference between... try { .... }catch(Exception e) { //Do stuff throw new MyCustomException(“Something Bad happened”); } And try { .... }catch(Exception e) { //do stuff throw; }

In what case would you ever want the second example?

usually you may catch a general exception and throw another one that's caught up the call stack. In this case i think it may be useful for logging additional causes that are not going to be obvious with just the stacktrace(?)

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

#330

Post by debaserab2 »

beardbound wrote: post #291
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 work in QA and I wish more developers thought this way. Also run your code before hand off. Please. If I had a nickel for every time I got a user story or bug to validate and it immediately crashes then I would have a bunch of nickels. Which wouldn't be super helpful, but still. Please at least run your code, or ideally you should have CI/CD with unit tests, but we all know that isn't always the case especially in…

It's easy to make the assumption that developers haven't ran the code at all, but I find in reality that's rarely the case. In my experience it almost always has something to do with an unexpected environment variant.

It's very easy as a developer to get so comfortable with the "happy path" of navigating code that you forget to look outside of the happy path when devising your test cases. It takes time to learn to identify the test cases you're not regularly exposing yourself, and these test cases are often ones not described in a requirements or specs doc.

Post reply on HN