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What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

We were all juniors at some time, and in the spirit of sharing here: what's some good advice for junior developers?

What things would you like to tell yourself when you were a junior?

Top comments (75)

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos • Edited

If I have Doc Brown's DeLorean, this is what I would advise my younger self

  1. Keep your head down during code reviews. Humility goes a long way. They're not criticizing you, it's your code they're after. It's not personal
  2. Do the required reading before you get knee-deep in the code. You have a propensity to shoot from the hip, curb that enthusiasm. Don't read the manual only when you're in trouble
  3. Design patterns are nice, but you don't have to use all of them, all the time in every code you write
  4. Learn Python early. Get to the Python REPL and type import this. Learn it by heart, then read no. 3 (above) again
  5. Coffee, pizza and chips are nice now, but 20 years from now, you're gonna wish you didn't eat those
  6. In a couple of years, social media is gonna be big. Stay out of it
  7. Those math subjects you hated, better get more comfortable with them. There's gonna be a thing called "machine learning", it's gonna be big, you're gonna need them maths
  8. Stop wondering when you will graduate from being a junior, you'll know it when you're out of it. When you start making technical choices and you recognize that there are choices to be made; then you're not so junior anymore
  9. Be polite when asking questions. If you don't want to get the RTFM response (a lot), read Eric Raymond's guide on how to ask smart questions
  10. When you go to a meeting, always bring a pen and paper. Write your notes
  11. If it's taking you more than 3 hours to figure out something, ask for help, tell your tech lead what's eating you up (but make sure that before you do this, you've read no. 9 above)
  12. If you promised your tech lead (client, coworker or boss) you will deliver the thing on Friday, and you're not gonna make it, tell them early. Don't tell them on Friday
  13. Exercise. You're brain (and your blood pressure) will love you for it
  14. When the book "Pragmatic programmer, journeyman to master" comes out. Read it
  15. From time to time, write a program in LOLCODE, don't lose your humor

There's a lot more, but these are my big ones

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nebojsac profile image
Nick Cinger

This comment needs a "share" button.

Dude, make a post out of this!

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos
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juanfrank77 profile image
Juan F Gonzalez

Dude thanks for this! I'll be sharing it with some buddies.

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos

Glad you liked it

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos

I'll get right on it. Thanks

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mahendrachoudhary profile image
Mahendra Choudhary

thanks @Ted_Hagos , i just started out as a junior dev

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xanadev profile image
abid

needs a PR.

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos

So there's the tongue-in-cheek (ish) advise. Levity aside, let's look at another angle of the question. How does one get out or graduate from being a junior to something else; a senior, I suppose. This is an age-old question and a lot of brilliant minds tried to answer this (I'm pretty sure, a lot more brilliant minds in the future will still try to answer it), this is my favorite so far Programmer Competency Matrix.

Some of the item on the matrix might be abstract but some can get hairy detailed. I don't agree with all of it, but (at least) where I work(ed), there seems to be a general agreement on it. Take it with a grain of salt; remember, you found it on the internet

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shinyuy profile image
Shinyuy Marcel

Please Sir be my mentor.

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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos

I'd love to, but I'm terrible mentor. Thanks though

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shinyuy profile image
Shinyuy Marcel

Ok sir,though u don't sound like u will be a terrible mentor, but i respect your decision.

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shinyuy profile image
Shinyuy Marcel

Okay Sir, though you don't sound like one who would make a terrible mentor, but I respect your decision.

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

This is probably the best advice I've ever gotten... ever. Thanks!

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vamsc0801 profile image
vamsikrishna • Edited

Please post repeated architecture and production information,thank you

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owusudev profile image
Owusu Samuel

Can you explain the point 3. I thought using design pattern is a good code practice.

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webreaper profile image
Mark Otway

He's basically saying "fit the solution to the problem, and don't over-engineer". Not everything needs a design pattern, so sometimes just keep it simple, avoid abstraction layers if possible, and don't optimise prematurely.

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structed profile image
Johannes Ebner ☁🎮

Design patterns are names for common solutions to common problems and therefore often just a label to shorten a discussion. Do not apply a pattern for the pattern's sake, but apply the right pattern to fit a given problem.

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sarahmei profile image
Sarah Mei • Edited
  1. People should respect you. It's your right to push back against disrespectful interactions. If it's waved away with "oh, [person] is just like that," know that a) that is bullshit and b) both the person being disrespectful AND the one dismissing it are wrong.

  2. You can become a great developer EVEN if you spend your nights & weekends doing other things. Be focused, make those work hours count, and then leave your office and spend your free time out in the wider world.

  3. Resist tribalism in all forms.
    a) Your role as a software engineer isn't more or less important to the company than other roles.
    b) Your place on the stack isn't more or less prestigious than other places.
    c) The technology you use has its ideal use cases - and so do all the alternatives.

  4. Anyone who justifies something by saying it's "an industry best practice" actually has NO IDEA why they're doing it. Push (gently, respectfully) to see if they can articulate the actual positive outcome they expect.
    a) same goes for "idiomatic," "more elegant," and "cleaner"

  5. Do not read Robert Martin's books, unless you're working at a large, old company - and in that case, view them as anthropological studies that will help you survive in an alien environment.

More seriously - they're written for a previous generation, and while they might help you understand the current crop of 'senior' developers better, their techniques and attitudes are out of date and won't be useful to you moving forward. You're in a new world! You have the chance to make a real impact with your communication and technical skills. Go out & do it your way.

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tony_mowers profile image
Tony Mowers • Edited
  1. You deserve to be treated respectfully until you don’t deserve it.
  2. You can become a good programmer even if you don’t spend your free time advancing your skills. It’s ok to not be great, but be mindful that there are those with passion who put in extraordinary effort to learn their craft. Don’t expect to get the same results without the same effort.
  3. Not all roles are equal in all companies. That’s the reality of life.
  4. Industry best practices do exist, and yes it’s good to be able to articulate why it’s a best practice. However doing something because that’s how others do it does not make it wrong. Learn why it’s a best practice.
  5. Read Uncle Bob’s Clean Code and Clean Architecture books. Watch his videos. Learn something about writing software which won’t be out of date in a couple years. A lot of the technology skills we learn, although important, depreciate very quickly and so are very costly to maintain. What Uncle Bob teaches keeps its value.
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tedhagos profile image
Ted Hagos

It's too bad I can only click the ❤ once

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geolamp profile image
George Lampadaridis

Could not agree more

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

You can become a great developer EVEN if you spend your nights & weekends doing other things. Be focused, make those work hours count, and then leave your office and spend your free time out in the wider world.

Totally agree with this. I really had my hair on fire for the first few months I got a job, all because I believed I needed to be programming all day AND night. I only realized that could not be the answer when I found myself burnt out from programming in an actual job setting working with actual people. Spending 6 - 8 hours doing something was already plenty of practice. Taking care of myself was still required, and when I did so I became a better engineer (and better everything).

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hgraca profile image
Herberto Graça

I’ve followed you for some time on twitter and most of what u say ressonate with me.
But this last point is plain wrong.
It disapoints me.
It makes me sad that u give such bad advice to new developers just because you have a grudge on UncleBob.
You should do some introspection and try to improve yourself as a person.

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douglasheeren profile image
Douglas Heeren

The fist 4 points apply to any employee in just about any job. Pretty much common sense. The 5th point is an unfortunate opinion. If the concepts in the Clean Code series were taught in college, we would an entirely different software landscape and the entire industry would be much more productive and less of a cause for stress. Thus allowing you more time to do what you love.

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rrusson profile image
Ryan Russon

Yes, "you're in a new world! Go out & do it your way!" Ignore best practices! Feel empowered and special, ignorantly making the same mistakes that created mountains of awful legacy code left by the last generation of coders. Later, you can enjoy your "participant" trophy while professionals try to clean up the inscrutable, unmanageable, buggy hacks you've left behind!

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jess profile image
Jess Lee

I've heard Robert Martin books recommended over and over again, so really appreciate this thought!

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jasonsolinsky profile image
Jason Solinsky

Uncle Bob is politically conservative. Sarah finds him offensive, so she's added an attack against him to the end of her otherwise excellent advice.

Sarah should heed her own advice about tribalism.

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remotelyliving profile image
Christian Thomas • Edited

Yeah, the difference between Clean Code and this advice column is time and evidence. There's evidence that the concepts taught in clean code work well and there's been plenty of time and happy developers to see it. Other than a pat on the back and a blackballing of Bob, I doubt there will be little useful substance from this piece in more than a few months of a young developer's life...stuff that they already didn't know or outgrow. It's common sense. What isn't common sense how to organize and test code at every level. It's one of the most empathetic things you can learn for your team and the one thing no one knows how to do out of school. I've seen devs drowning in complexity and domain with no way to organize or think about it. Then the framework abuse happens cause they don't know the concepts behind what makes the framework work. This is just advocating the kind of blind solipsism it claims to reject. Talk about tribalism.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

All amazing advice Sarah!

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antero_nu profile image
Antero Karki

Thank you for a great answer.

Seems most others answer the wrong question, either "how can a junior developer get to where I am?" (which was where my thinking went at first and why I felt uncomfortable giving an answer) or "what would I like my co-workers to be like?"

I would only like to add regarding point 1 that you also have a right to expect an environment where you are comfortable to speak and if that isn't the case it's never your fault. Any place where they think this happens automatically just because "we're all good people" is probably wrong in this, it needs to be actively encouraged.

So I guess the best advice I can give to juniors is that if there is something you want to change then "change your workplace or change your workplace." (don't remember who I'm quoting/paraphrasing)

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delbetu profile image
M Bellucci

Why do you think that Robert Martin’ books are out of date ?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I don't think they're entirely out of date for all developers, but I agree with Sarah's assessment for juniors. I specifically instruct juniors not to bother with that material early on in their career, but highly recommend it to folks who are a little further along—as great reference material, with some parts worth ignoring.

It's not that the advice and techniques are all out of date, but for juniors it could be hard to separate the dated from non-dated. It makes sense that an older book which covers a lot of ground would not stand up entirely over time.

I'm not speaking for Sarah's reasoning, but this is my answer for your question!

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laurencebarry profile image
laurencebarry

So it's okay for junior devs to write bad code early in their careers?! What a bizarre attitude

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webreaper profile image
Mark Otway

It's okay for everyone to write bad code sometimes. Not everything has to be perfectly structured and totally optimised. 'Tactical' can be good sometimes, and technical debt isn't always evil - as long as you aren't blind to it and have a plan to get rid of it or pay down the debt. Pragmatism is a key element of remaining commercial.

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Alper Cugun-Gscheidel

I could not agree more with point 5. Those books are a relic and most of the stuff in there has nothing to do with how software is actually built in the world (thankfully).

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laurencebarry profile image
laurencebarry

Would you care to post a sample of your code? I assume it is miserable. Because your attitude is very odd

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alpercugun profile image
Alper Cugun-Gscheidel

I have programmed in a bunch of professional contexts and never had a complaint. All without that miserable character.

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laurencebarry profile image
laurencebarry

Which 'stuff' in those books do you disagree with? Is it the well structured code with sensible class, function and variable names and decent sized functioned, or the good OO practice and patterns or the properly tested code?

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mtzagkarakis profile image
Manos Tzagkarakis

The comment about not reading Uncle Bob's books is pure prejudice. Except if it is some kind of joke which I don't get.

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reyabreu profile image
Reynaldo Jose Abreu

Talk about hypocrisy: tribalism and disrespect steeped in ideology are the norm of most interactions one reads from you.

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dandy profile image
dandy

I would give just one advice to all programmers in start of their career. Please spare sometime and read Robert C.Martin books on clean code. Namely
Clean Code and
The Clean Coder

It changes perspective of how one reads and writes code for better.

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

I taught myself to program on the job to automate a lot of repetitive tasks and eventually built a rather complex web app. One of the things I look back on now that I have been doing this for a number of years is my decision to look up and curate a list of best practices. I followed that as closely as possible and I think that was a life saver. I think any developer of any level can benefit by taking the extra effort to follow a best practice guideline. Just remember that they are in fact guidelines and that sometimes there are better ways to do things in a specific scenario, but that will come with experience.

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ewoks profile image
Beeblebrox

can you maybe share your curated list of best practises?

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

I don't have my original list from 3~4 years, a job, and a move across the country ago but here is the gist:

  • symfony.com/doc/current/best_pract... (symfony specific)
  • php-fig.org/psr/
  • Always test your code, a mix of automated and manual
    • Especially in web a unit test doesn't tell you the website looks awful
  • Keep functions/methods simple (doing as few things as possible)
  • Use/create libraries/services when code will need to be reused.
    • But keep them simple, you don't want a million flags just so you can cram everything into one function
  • And whatever else you might do write comments/document your code.
    • People need to be able to understand what you are accomplishing (including yourself 6 months from now)

Now not all of these may apply to you, such as Symfony, but I think for the most part these are universal.

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danazar96 profile image
Aidan Walters-Williams • Edited

I may be a little short on experience to give my advice here, I'm not exactly a senior but here's my two cents worth from what I've picked up from my own experience :)

If you have what you think is a good idea about how to approach a problem, voice it to your team! If it is a genuinely good idea, then it may be accepted and you can take the credit, and it will really boost your confidence! If it's not such a good idea, that's okay! More often than not, the more senior members of your team will explain to you why it's not such a good idea and possibly even give you pointers on what is, and then you've learned something - making you a better developer in the process.

Don't be afraid to ask questions! If you're stuck on a problem for more than an hour or so and you can't think of a way around it after searching for your it on your own, ask a team member regardless of how silly you might think it is! Chances are that it isn't at all that silly, and your team will be happy to help you in any way they can. After all, it's not only juniors that need to ask questions, senior developers aren't necessarily omniscient beings (although some do seem to be!)
Don't abuse or rely on this though, try searching/reading first - figuring stuff out on your own is a much more valuable experience than just getting an answer from somebody else!

Approach learning from an "Understand, don't imitate" perspective. Given the wealth of advice and examples available, it's so easy to find a solution that matches your exact scenario and just use that solution, rather than understand it. Learn how, and more importantly why, that solution works and apply that why to your scenario, even if it is the same.

Not getting your pull request through code review first time is okay. Everybody has their own approaches to problems, and a comment on your code review saying "X could be improved by Y because Z" doesn't necessarily mean you're not a good enough developer for only thinking of X, rather than Y. It's usually more a case of your haven't encountered a scenario that leads you to see the reasoning Z that causes you to use Y over X yet.

That's all I've got for now, hope it helps someone! :)

PS: Don’t work yourself to exhaustion trying to play catch up with the other developers, go at your own pace! Future you, your friends and your family will thank you for it! Coffee and vitamin supplements might be good for a temporary focus boost, but nothing compared to rest, socialising, exercise and hobbies!

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remotesynth profile image
Brian Rinaldi

Be open to change and don't let your job dictate what you are able to learn.

By "be open to change" I mean don't tie yourself to a specific technology, language, framework, whatever. Over the course of your career, you will end up changing course and I've found that those who are adaptable and open to learning new technologies are generally the most successful long term.

By "don't let your job dictate what you are able to learn" I mean, follow your passions regardless of what your job requires. Never say, "I want to learn X, but my job doesn't care about it." If you want to learn something, find a way to learn it, regardless of your job. It takes commitment and effort, but it pays off in the long run and keeps you from feeling constrained.

Finally, despite what I say in the paragraph above, do not believe anyone who tells you that you need to spend all your free time coding or beefing up your GitHub profile. Be a well rounded person, with interests outside of tech and code. The people and places that don't appreciate that should be avoided.

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ennor profile image
Enno Rehling (恩諾) • Edited

"First you search, then you ask". Learning things by yourself is much more valuable than sinply having somebody tell you how it's done, and even if you don't figure it out, you'll know better what it is you're struggling with. Eventually, if you're not figuring it out, don't be afraid to ask a senior developer, but prepare for the inevitable question, "what have you tried already?"

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theoutlander profile image
Nick Karnik
  1. Focus on your growth and don't compare yourself to others. You should be inspired by other people's accomplishments.

  2. Don't worry about the framework of the day or library of the year. Focus on the basics.

  3. Take everything with a grain of salt. Do your own research and make an educated decision.

  4. Don't just make data-driven decisions. Let the data guide you.

  5. Embrace change. Nothing is permanent.

  6. Employers don't hand down a big raise, bonus, or promotion. You control your career, so you need to ask for it.

  7. Side projects will help you stay on the cutting-edge.

  8. Pick a language, framework, and ecosystem and stick to it as long as you can. However, be prepared to learn something new when the time comes.

  9. Interviews are unfair. Don't let them demotivate you.

  10. Don't be afraid of engineers senior to you and those who have been in the industry for long. They will most likely be opinionated and they're not always right. At the same time, you can learn a lot from them and they can learn from you.

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tusharborole profile image
Tushar Borole

Learn the basic concept of javascript first instead of learning frameworks like angular or react

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skittishsloth profile image
Matthew Cory

I'd generalize this to all languages and frameworks. +1 though.

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mtzagkarakis profile image
Manos Tzagkarakis • Edited

There are tons of things to do when you are a junior and people here here are suggesting a lot of great things, but if there is a single advise that I would give to a junior it would be:

Read code. See how people have solve a problem and how the solution was formed in order to be Solid and testable. Then when you write code try to implement a thing or two be yourself.

Bruno Souza (Java Champion) has given me this advice and I keep doing it ever since.

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