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When you hire a junior developer, they are themselves a project. How else could it be? The need for mentoring is what makes them a junior. If they didn't need m
by cturner 9y ago
When you hire a junior developer, they are themselves a project. How else could it be? The need for mentoring is what makes them a junior. If they didn't need mentoring, they would not be a junior.
Code reviews are a reactive exercise. They allow people of influence to criticise work. But it is important that people of influence have first stepped up, and laid out a clear direction.
As the mentor, you should have a mental plan for their one month, three months and eighteen month progressions. If you do not have this in mind, you should not have hired them.
From here, you should set a tempo that steers the junior to grow. The things you are growing are their skills, judgement and initiative. You need to balance the need to make sure they are heading down a good path against the momentum of their own initiative, which is valuable but also prone to misfiring.
This path will be different for each person. So: have a plan, but be prepared to adjust it regularly.
There comes a crossover point where their judgement and ability becomes strong. You realise that your steering efforts are holding them back vs their own initiative. There should be some conversation where you explain that you are stepping back, and that they should be careful with the extra rope they will be getting. With graduate hires this will be at least eighteen months out.
- zackya89 9y agoIm hired as junior dev. at a relatively large non-tech company, to provide them with software tools, I built all these tools by myself with no mentoring and no help, My fear is this, my code looks clunky (probably not written according to good software design ?), and hard to read for others, I also have no skills in collaboration, how would I be able to grow these skills without a mentor ?.
- rjsw 9y agoYou sound as if you are already able to teach yourself, just read more open-source code to find out what is good or bad style.
- mwdalrymple 9y agoI would consider soliciting a formal mentor here on hackernews. Hacking on a open source project together would be a way to recieve that help in a remote fashion. Sounds like there should be a thread to match mentors and mentees here on hackernews. Maybe a bunch of mentors post some open source projects that they want mentees for?
- coolguy2282 9y agoI would jump on something like that, I'm a senior university student currently with no work experience on my resume. I have been unable to do internships during summers because I usually need to spend that time helping out my sick father every year, and it terrifies me that I'm going to have to jump into the marketplace with no internships or anything really on my resume. Every time I try to 'contribute to open source projects' online I get overwelmed by the size and complexity of most codebases, I have tried numerous times, and have never been able to fix a bug. This type of thread is something I'm sure I and others would take serious advantage of.