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> * figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done This is true, but be careful about taking this too far. Young people
by PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> * figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done
This is true, but be careful about taking this too far.
Young people arrive at the workforce with a wide range of expectations and motivations. Some of those are going to be unrealistic. You should always try to work with them to understand what drives them and help them find their fit.
The most frequent misaligned expectation I've seen in juniors is the desire to lead greenfield projects in year 1 of their career. It can be very disappointing to arrive at your dream job and learn that you have to work on someone else's code, and that you have to build a reputation before they'll hand you the fun greenfield work.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI wish there was more focus on working with existing code in education, since it is by far most of the work in real projects, and also the hardest.
- bobthepanda 4y agoIt's kind of hard to make "legacy" purposefully bad code that is useful for teaching assignments. Certainly a lot more work than drawing up a spec.
- BurningFrog 4y agoChanging existing bad code i an advanced topic. Just working with adding features to decent existing code is all I ask.
- unsui 4y agoLiterally just had this situation come up in a recent 1:1 with one of our junior devs. He asked about being able to work on greenfield projects focusing on AWS technologies. I had to go into a historical context data dump on the value of addressing technical debt (the project she is being assigned to), and how that frees us up to work on the cool and shiny projects. I think it landed, but I could see some of the fire slightly snuffed out of him.