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What are some good, holistic approaches for helping train up-and-coming developers all the way to “senior developer” skill level?
The senior's time is rarely wasted. They can always do time consuming high level work like designing test cases, planning out the next part of the work, seeing if the API supports stuff.
Pair programming for sure. Senior designs the code, junior writes it. Senior doesn't touch keyboard. It's real time code reviewing. The senior's time is rarely wasted. They can always do time consuming high level work like designing test cases, planning out the next part of the work, seeing if the API supports stuff.
Coworkers shouldn't be treated as StackOverflow unless absolutely last resort because it is incredibly distracting to answer mentees' easily-Googled questions about built-in language API calls every 15 minutes or so. A lot of programming is just professional Googling. Once they can function independently, they are no longer junior developers IMO, but this is a learned skill.
When I started programming, I had enough people on IRC berating and insulting me for asking about standard C library calls that I learned how to research and solve my own problems the hard way (the acronym "RTFM" is toxic). It felt awful, and I can imagine a lot of people getting discouraged and just giving up.
I was in high school trying to write my own malloc just for fun, and random strangers on the Internet kept calling me an "idiot" because I was still learning pointer arithmetic and needed help (and nobody IRL could help me).
Pair programming for sure. Senior designs the code, junior writes it. Senior doesn't touch keyboard. It's real time code reviewing. The senior's time is rarely wasted. They can always do time consuming high level work like designing test cases, planning out the next part of the work, seeing if the API supports stuff.
Your company has to have the right culture for this. Companies like this are rare. Most just assign whatever's in the queue to whomever's going to take it, meaning that everyone has "something" to do at all times.