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

This change is starting to emerge and the programming opportunities for the future will start to erode.

You should get confirmation in writing to verify your understanding and protect against a non malicious, honest manager who has a lot of things on his plate and may honestly forget the details of a conversation.

But, if you hope written communication will help you as a CYA move if you have a conflict with your manager and your manager is being purposefully underhanded, that rarely works.

The organizations primary job is to protect the organization. Unless you’re a special snowflake, your manager’s manager or your HR department will always take the side of a manager.

That’s just like getting a PIP. Once you get one, learn from your mistakes and take an honest self assessment - but do it at another job. If you interview while having a job, it’s much easier than trying to interview if you got fired.

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 before you are absolutely exhausted and passing out, I know it's sounds tempting but please please do not fall into the trap management or more senior people (that were forced to do this too but didn't learn or are "paying it back" now negatively) to wrest that one last drop of energy. After your X allotted time, even if you are still feeling energized, go spend that energy jogging or something! Work a craft, learn to play an instrument.

Risking to toot my own horn, this might be the single best non-technical advice in this thread.

IMO: Being too comfortable in the same position is not good enough

I don't think programming is something you become good at simply by doing your 9-5. I've worked with a lot of 9-5'ers and they're rarely the best or most rewarded developers.

What I'm certainly NOT saying is that you should work _all_ hours, in fact I will say exactly the opposite, don't, but, do be willing (if you're able) to finish solving a problem before you call it a day. For your sake, not for your employer's sake. I prefer to finish my work day on the last "problem solved". It leaves you in a much better position to leave your work at work, than when you have a problem you didn't solve and which will bug you until you solve it. If you find a problem is going to take more than "minutes" to solve, accept that its a problem for another day and try to leave it at that.

To further elaborate on my first statement, so it isn't misinterpreted again;

Do it because you enjoy it, and you _want_ to do more of it outside of work; even if you don't do, but, even IF you don't, you can visit conferences, meetups, hack-spaces, various other -con, you'll meet cool people, learn about things you didn't know and perhaps teach other something. If you can make it "a way of life", contrary to ck425, do spend _some_ of your free time working on programming tasks, find something different from your work, for example, contribute some time to an OSS project you like (for e.g. I use and like to contribute to Home Assistant) or some other project you enjoy using, where you'll interact with the skilled people behind those projects.

To be clear, that I'm not disagreeing with ck425, just that he (and probably others) might misinterpret what I'm saying as "you should spend all your time programming or else you'll suck": Do all of this, only after you done the other things you enjoy doing more.