Junior Developers: Get Your Priorities Straight!

Let's get your technical priorities straight and get you career moving from junior to mid-level and senior!

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👉 Terminal Theme and font? oh-my-posh with powerlevel10k_rainbow and SpaceMono NF

0:00 Introduction
1:01 Fix Prod
2:22 Save Drowning Co-Workers
2:55 Remove Blockers
3:32 Fix The Build
4:35 Zero Errors Fewer Warnings
5:20 Outroduction

#juniordev #juniorenginners #toppriorities #juniordevelopers

[king-manu]

Man, how cool would it be to have Jack as your senior dev. He just oozes wisdom.

[andrignacio]

As a Jr (1yr exp) I would recommend joining all the debugging meetings you can (even if it is not in your area), even if you don't understand anything your seniors are doing, the more you join:
1. - They will see that you are there and want to learn.
2. - Yes, at first you will be fucking lost but by the 5th-10th you will start catching new ways to do stuff, see how seniors communicate with each other, and how they approach problem-solving.

Also, be all the time with your best attitude, I found out my seniors didn't care if my code was bad, or I made stupid mistakes, they cared way more than I was always positive and accepted my mistakes and learned from them, nobody wants a dev with a shitty attitude and less a jr that only complaints :)

I quit my first job last week and I can tell that all these things helped me a lot because seniors and LM were sad to see me go (I was the only junior) and the company even tried to make a counteroffer for me to stay. Now I am very excited for my next challenge at a very very BIG company :)

[limpep]

I would add contributing to documentation such as, style guides, run books or read me's. Just shows that you're engaged in the whole process and team.

[patrickthompson]

One of the things I’ve found that has been the biggest difference is how much you care about the code too. You can tell when a developer takes pride in their code, self documents it, runs their unit tests/e2e/lint to make sure the quality is always consistent.

[Euquila]

This video was a good reminder for me about how grateful I am that I am able to work independently. No unit tests, no meetings, no bug quotas, just me communicating infinitely fast with my own brain. The only good thing about climbing the corporate ladder is the nice people you get to meet.

[amd]

Please, we need more like this.
Team leader, manager, head all we need.
Thank you

[TomDoesTech]

Awesome advice! I would also add: try to automate where possible. Not because it will save you time, but because it reduces the mental load of doing tasts, making you more likely to do them.

[stephanvandermeijden]

I started development in june 2020, had a job for 7 months and so many points you addressed I've never done.

I was the only front end developer so;

- No senior / other front end developer to discuss with
- I still am very bad at planning projects. I was a cook for 18 years and I am fairly good at planning there, but in that field you learn by looking at other people. I may have missed it, but a video that really goes through a project and how you plan it would go a long way for, I am sure, many people!

At least I was the only one blocking myself at my last job and when I drowned I just drowned. Let's hope my next job gives a better experience. Thanks for your great videos!

[chetanjeevsinghbains]

I’ll add one more point to the list being junior React native developer is the approach of issue resolution. Your senior being more experienced can give you right approach for that issue rather than you spending time on wrong approach which eradicates the issues but affects other aspects, feature and optimization

[Myoochi]

This video came right in time. I'm hopefully starting my first junior dev job in 2 months, after being a freelancer in my after (college) hours. Hope I'm smart enough to keep up with the team and learn tons of new things.

Thanks again Jack! And also lovely to see you're taking the time to like/respond to all the comments, really shows you care about your community. Keep up the awesome work :-)

[BoudewijnDanser]

I'm sharing these with the team, great tips! Nice to have a video like this shot outside btw.

[theyreMineralsMarie]

At least for my team, long build times are a result of top-down requirements to run additional code analysis tools. Black Duck, Coverity, etc all add significant time to builds. Every else you said is absolutely true and useful for junior devs.

[universecode]

As always great tips 🙌🏻 You are a MASTER JACK 👏🏻

[zshn]

Hey Jacks, thanks for the awesome videos. Quick YouTube tip: Don't use underscores in your hashtags. You can click on them and see if they are popular tags. For eg. #juniordev is more popular than #junior_developers. You can also search hastags directly before uploading a video to see which are helpful and reach a bigger / niche audience. Cheers.

[NamHoang-qwdd]

I am currently in junior and senior rank (2y+) so your tips are very helpful. I will try those tips to make my work more effective to my team. Thank you ☺️

[bythealphabet]

Thank you, Jack.
Very nice tip. of getting out of the way but finding ways to help the team.

I just got into that phase😅.

[shinmessiah]

This is all really good information, can be applied across several towers in an organization. Agile note is a good one because companies like the one I work for tend to apply Agile selectively or PMs don’t know to how interface with staff, causing communication issues that lead to more blocks.

[mordicai]

I'm finally finishing my cs degree and portfolio next month!!!
I'm so ready for some practical work, and I desperately need some money. 😂
This video was like getting a glimpse into the future, thank you.

[HabtamuDesalegn]

Thanks for sharing such useful tips. For next I loved to see your experience on eslint rule setup/configuration for react/react native. Thanks in advance

[npf]

One mistake i made a few times as a junior dev is a +50 megladon file PR... big no no too much chance of an error/bug, keep your PR changed files to 20-30 max as atomic PR with comments in areas where your fellow devs may not know why. breakdown your PR to its subtasks as sub branches (BE 1/2 then FE 1/2). one thing i would add to Jacks Errors topic is throwing the right type of error to the frontend from the backend is important not just for catching errors for the dev but also for the user