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How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

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Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#151

Post by sdrothrock »

skyisblue wrote: post #149
sdrothrock wrote: post #90

I work at a small Japanese company with only two developers; myself and a junior developer (also American) we brought on as my assistant a year ago. He came on with little to no development and technological experience but an incredible work/study ethic and a willingness to learn, which are both MUCH more important to me. The skills can be learned and refined over time, but the fundamentals need to be there; if a dev…

Currently have a junior dev on the team that asks way too many questions, most that can be easily googled. How do we push him in the right direction to become more independant.

Your particular handling of him will depend on his personality and relation to the team, but one way I've found to handle this is to sit with him on a few questions and walk him through the most basic levels of your thought process as you think of queries and Google them, select results, etc. This way you're "teaching him to fish" so that he can use that methodology in the future.

While it may often seem simple to "just Google it," it can be difficult for people to come up with appropriate queries and weigh results, especially in new/unknown contexts.

A lot of the time we have ready answers if other people ask us questions because we're actively ready to attack and criticize to get an answer, but we're more reluctant to do that with ourselves. So if the teaching approach doesn't work, then another way is to ask him to list up the questions he has, give it 10-15 minutes, then review them himself to see how he would answer them -- the idea is to give him some time to "reset" and get a fresh perspective.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#152

Post by foobazzy »

skyisblue wrote: post #149
sdrothrock wrote: post #90

I work at a small Japanese company with only two developers; myself and a junior developer (also American) we brought on as my assistant a year ago. He came on with little to no development and technological experience but an incredible work/study ethic and a willingness to learn, which are both MUCH more important to me. The skills can be learned and refined over time, but the fundamentals need to be there; if a dev…

Currently have a junior dev on the team that asks way too many questions, most that can be easily googled. How do we push him in the right direction to become more independant.

Well, my mentor used to yell "RTFM, doood!". Which I did. And got the answer more than once. I would like to agree that(as a sibling comment points out) this depends on his personality and relation to the team.

When it was my chance to mentor, I would sit with the junior guy and just talk about the context and problem at hand. Talk about the keywords and then form a query to google. I would sometimes intentionally put in the wrong query and then refine it for better results. It worked.

But juniors are sometimes bad at retaining processes and a similar query would pop up in a few weeks again. Then I would just send them a lmgtfy link (which is a dick move. Don't do this). Have some compassion, patience and empathy. It might take longer but that guy will thank you in the long run.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#153

Post by richardknop »

nvarsj wrote: post #148
richardknop wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most contractors are senior devs from my experience. One reason to go contracting is if you're a senior dev already and your career progression seems stuck because you're at the top of salaried positions in your company already. Going contracting is a way to get a pay rise for people like that.

Going contracting in IT in London is a way to get a pay rise for anyone. A senior dev contractor will likely make more than a director or architect at the same company. The whole situation is wacky.

Yeah that's true. But to get really high daily rates you need to be senior dev with decent amount of experience from my experience.

I agree the whole situation is a bit ridiculous. But when in majority of companies salaries for developers are limited to something like 60-70k.

This has been slowly changing and there are more companies willing to pay up to 90k but even then as contractor you can make equivalent of 120k or more even after still taking 25 days off per year.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#154

Post by UK-AL »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #135
UK-AL wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What your talking about matches my complaints exactly. I dont understand. Developers are almost never included in those stages. Your given designs that have already been completed. Then you "make them happen", you have no input in the designs because they have already been designed and signed off. They only care about the speed of implementation, not quality. Agile means that requirements can be more easily changed f…

> "Developers are almost never included in those stages." That's not been my experience. I've seen business analysts working closely with developers to scope out what's needed and find the the best way forward, before the coding is due to start. For all the the apparent negatives of waterfall, I've seen that it can work quite well, when it's used correctly.

In reality I find that the devil is in the details, and you only find the problems when your implementing them.

Having approach that can tolerate that is essential.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#157

Post by zimpenfish »

josh602 wrote: post #99
valuearb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to put managers in the same area as their teams. It's fine if you prefer to work in an open area. But studies are pretty consistent that developers are more productive with fewer distractions. Not giving developers the option of private offices is underutilizing some of your most expensive resources.

True! I think a lot of modern workplaces are good at compromising on this. In our case, we don't have private offices, but there are quiet working areas that you can go to to work. Although these are sparse in our Salford campus, unfortunately; there's a lot more in the London buildings.

> but there are quiet working areas that you can go to to work

Doesn't help if you have a desktop and no laptop. Plus there weren't many in White City last year when I was there - everything was co-opted to be a meeting room or office as they slowly closed off various sections for refittings.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#158

Post by zimpenfish »

lc94 wrote: post #101

What they don't mention is the abysmal salary (£23,000~) they start you on. No idea why anyone would choose to work there.

They pa{y,id} contractors well last year but IIRC they were drastically reducing their use due to new tax regulations or something.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#159

Post by cableshaft »

dba7dba wrote: post #84
klenwell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. I can relate. At my last gig, it wasn't the seniors developers (well, it was some of them, too). It was the principal developer. As my supervisor, he told me, a senior developer, I asked too many questions. "A senior developer shouldn't need to ask questions." My questions usually weren't even technical questions but rather questions meant to clarify business specs so that we could make better technical decisions…

> "A senior developer shouldn't need documentation. The knowledge should be in your head." So a senior developer shouldn't document, and shouldn't answer questions (since he said one shouldn't ask questions)? What's a junior dev to do when there is no documentation and no one to ask for help/clarification?

Why, look at the senior developer's brilliant, perfectly intuitive code, and know everything about the system instantly, of course!

I live this life right now. No documentation, and the senior devs have left, so you just have to figure out what the hell they're thinking as best as you can with the code left behind, sometimes stepping through everything multiple times to see how the data flows through it. Thankfully one of the architects that used to work here knew how to make readable, modular code, so our newer projects aren't too bad to modify, but our legacy systems are awful nests of spaghetti.

Re: How We Grow Junior Developers at the BBC

#160

Post by [deleted] »

matwood wrote: post #129
tcbawo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an age or experience thing. People can be jerks at any age or level. Good engineers do not equate illiteracy of the codebase (unfamiliarity) with ineptitude. Good engineers educate without contempt. On the flip side, many people come into an organization questioning why or how things are done. Often, the current product is a ball of inperfection and compromises. Spend 2x more time reading the code than ask…

> Understand why a fence was put there before you tear it down. I'm using this line from now on. As a senior dev with a lot of experience I find myself often being the only one questioning the tear it down mentality. Everyone wants to write greenfield code, and instead of taking the time to understand why current code looks like it is a mess people just want to start over. IMO, no one sets out to make a mess. A mess…

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