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On the flip side, it seems that many young devs think that they should be allowed to do anything they want, without oversight whatsoever. I don't know of any ot

by tensor 8y ago

On the flip side, it seems that many young devs think that they should be allowed to do anything they want, without oversight whatsoever. I don't know of any other industry where junior people have this sort of arrogance. Usually people recognize they are junior and work to both learn from and gain the trust of their seniors. In development land, the attitude is "seniors are old, useless, and outdated" and any form of oversight at all "removes trust." E.g. A young dev suggests building their own database. After being told politely that this is an enormous task full of seriously hard problems and that it's not feasible to try, they yell about their "ideas being shot down" and that the work environment "lacks psychological safety."

lmilcin 8y ago
That's generally true. What is important, though, is how the very young devs are molded the first time they come to an organization. I have long experience working for various enterprises. One outlier company I worked for is Intel. Intel or at least the organization I worked for seems to be aiming to hire almost exclusively fresh out of university just to be the first one to "mold" the young engineer. Young engineers are immediately treated as adults trusted with their projects. Managers (not all, but I would say majority) seems themselves as shepherds rather than commanders. They will ensure projects are assigned to engineers and that engineers create value and they will try to debug if there is any cause of concern but will not assume the typical "single point of contact, single point of decision and authority on everything" role seen in most corporations. This of not true of all managers at Intel but it was very striking to me when I joined the company with some 15 years of experience in dev under my belt. Junior engineers seem to adjust to this immediately and seem to genuinely try their best to do best and try to seek wisdom which there typically is a lot of in the close vicinity.

by tensor 8y ago

lmilcin 8y ago

That's generally true. What is important, though, is how the very young devs are molded the first time they come to an organization. I have long experience working for various enterprises. One outlier company I worked for is Intel. Intel or at least the organization I worked for seems to be aiming to hire almost exclusively fresh out of university just to be the first one to "mold" the young engineer. Young engineers are immediately treated as adults trusted with their projects. Managers (not all, but I would say majority) seems themselves as shepherds rather than commanders. They will ensure projects are assigned to engineers and that engineers create value and they will try to debug if there is any cause of concern but will not assume the typical "single point of contact, single point of decision and authority on everything" role seen in most corporations. This of not true of all managers at Intel but it was very striking to me when I joined the company with some 15 years of experience in dev under my belt. Junior engineers seem to adjust to this immediately and seem to genuinely try their best to do best and try to seek wisdom which there typically is a lot of in the close vicinity.