Fighting Challenges As Junior Developers

What is the next step for a junior software developer? What does software career progression look like for junior developers? How do you get promoted at work and get to take more control of the work that you do?

In this episode, Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery and Modern Software Engineering, offers career advice for less experienced people. He defines what he thinks of as the distinction between a junior and a mid-level developer, and describes some of the skills you will need to develop before that next step in your software development career.

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[jimhumelsine]

Pairing is a great suggestion. Dave included an "Impostor Syndrome" graphic in his Tweet about this post.

I think the best way to address IS is to pair with someone who has less experience than you do. I've often found that I realize I know more than I thought I knew when when I am explaining it to someone else. The act of explaining, mentoring, presenting, etc. reframes your mind about the topic. It in these moments that I feel like I know the content, or I can more easily identify the holes in my knowledge.

[brownhorsesoftware]

Excellent! Only one thing to add: read lots of code. You can learn piles from both good and bad code and you will get some insight into what it means for code to be readable.

[petropzqi]

This one going directly to my "best" Playlist. There are more good suggestions in this video then I have got in my whole career. 9yr as a developer

[bernardobuffa]

If I have to pick one advice for novice developers is this: to study other people's code, specially of good, mature, and open source software, like Spring framework, or Hibernate, or even smaller libraries as the Apache Commons ones. This will not only give an idea of what the design principles are, but it will also cultivate the one's own 'softpedia' of existing software out there in order to avoid reinventing some wheels. Thanks for sharing your wisdom!

[RFalhar]

I find it is not that uncommon to find organizations that do this all wrong. Either they expect full ability to produce a working solution to a problem from a junior. (Had experience when someone in first grade IT college was given full freedom to implement critical piece of infrastructure) Or they hire seniors and then proceed to feed them pre-solved problems, hindering their ability to actually fit the solution to the problem.
These kind of organization are more common than we might think.

[Dline]

This was awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to make this!

-A junior developer

[drewwilson]

Appreciate the information. These videos have great eye candy. Well done to the editing team.

[ilovepickles]

Your insights have helped me so much. I was horribly stuck on a problem, so I tried something silly. It didn't work but it gave me insight to the problem. As soon as I realized this I thought "Ah, that's what Dave's talking about when he says to think experimentally. I just did an experiment." Thanks Dave!

[kosnowman]

I just start my first JS developer job and thank you for sharing !

[ViviAndHerMac]

I am a young professional, working in software since 4 years. Only within the last 1.5 year it came clear to me how I could improve in my career. Learning code architecture, better design and most importantly the social skills that one would need when working with co-located teams. I wonder since then why this is not part of any bachelor's or even master's degree to some extend. For example code review practices are so important but nobody teaches you a good practice. This is something I clearly miss in the educational structure. Only now I am able to look for valuable resources to find my way to improve on the same. Big part is this YouTube channel, thanks for the content!

[Juzzyjuzzy]

Pearls of wisdom from an O.G. Software engineer. I enjoyed every bit of this.

[sneibarg]

For me, personally, my intermittent development experience has been a problem. One of the most difficult projects I worked on was enhancement to an existing, very large, Perl 4 automation for log monitoring in a heterogenous environment. I believe reading code is a skill by itself, and an important one, but your advice in this video is most excellent. I bought Modern Software Engineering to add to my Kindle collection, and am still reading it.

[ryanarellano]

Fantastic. Love all the advice and perspective you provide. I can sense all the experience that went into this quality content.

[JW-gmwr]

your description of dysfunctional organization applies to 90% of Indian IT :D

[meytechchannel]

One minute into it and I am already clicking like.

[kurt]

Animated background - no Conway's game of life? :-p

[anj]

I feel like I'm in such dysfunctional team right now..
We are implementing pixel perfect design, with every little detail specified by a customer. And when they do not give concrete requirements on something the whole process falls apart. It is hard to describe everything what is wrong with this project.

I'm trying to be good engineer and write good and clean code, fix potential problems even outside scope of my ticket, make code base more DRY etc. But it is almost impossible in this project. It is a bit paradoxical, because despite this micro management in almost every detail, there is no clear vision of anything and there is no technical leadership and clear architecture goal. Even though around 50% are seniors or team leads. It is one big spaghetti. I feel dumb and powerless. I feel both like a junior not knowing what to do and like senior wanting to take charge in place of the missing leadership. But at the end of the day I don't think it is worth the effort to try to fix it if I'm just a mid level, and I don't think I have proper skills anyway.

[Hofer]

Are only high qualified people necessary for software development? Of course you need them, but you also need people who make the code cleaner.

[yungifez]

As someone who learnt alone and has been working open source

Was i ever a junior with this definition 😂😂


Edit: it's a joke, i had a period of time i copied code from the internet

Like full crappy login systems

[marcinx]

My two cents. Avoid - no matter of seniority - tutorials with 'screaming' titles in a style of: "THIS STACK WILL BE OBSOLETE in 2023!!11", "YOU MUST KNOW THIS in 2023".
These pseudo tutorials only boost anxiety. Focus on yourself, reach out to valuable tutors that don't care about shining.