My advice to junior developers

A client emailed me a while back and asked what advice I’d give to someone just starting out on their career.

As I began to write my reply, I realised that everything that popped to my mind was generic recitals that you can find after 10s of googling.

“Be curious”

“Work hard”

“Ask lots of questions”

Not that these are bad advice. But they’re incredibly vague and you know them already. I wasn’t going to add any value, so I stopped writing.

Clearly, I didn’t understand the problem deeply enough to offer someone useful, actional advice. Five months have passed, and the question has lingered in the back of my mind for some time. And finally, I feel I have thought about it enough to offer something useful.

So here it goes.

Become the expert on something, anything!

When you start a new game as a level 1 character, your immediate goal is to reach level 2. And it’s the same when you start out a career as a developer. The textbook definition for a junior developer is someone who needs supervision to complete their work.

Of course, you need to acquire the technical competency to reach the next level – to be able to complete most tasks without supervision. But you also have to earn the trust of your colleagues. To prove that they can depend on you and that “you know what you’re doing”.

What better way to do that than to become the subject matter expert on something.

It could be a new tool the company is trying to introduce.

It could be a library your team depends on.

It could be a legacy system that everyone else is afraid to touch. This is a great place for you to prove your worth. Most companies earn their money through their legacy systems, but these systems are seldom exciting to work on. Often, they’re down-right horrific to even look at. But given their criticality to the business, everyone is forced to tolerate them.

If you find a legacy system that is both critical to the business, and there is a lack of knowledge in the team. Then make yourself invaluable to the team by diving in and learning all you can about the system. Become the expert on this legacy system and soon everyone would be coming to you for answers.

Act older. No, seriously.

When you are younger than your peers in the workplace, don’t act like it. Don’t act like a novice. It’d only give others a chance to reinforce their pre-existing biases/stereotypes against your age.

Do everything to your fullest ability and behave in a mature way, maybe even more so than your older colleagues. Your age should not be a handicap, and it mustn’t be an excuse either.

I think the reverse should also be true when you’re older. Be youthful and be energetic. You don’t want to be the person that saps the energy out of a room. Challenge the status quo with the goal of improving things, not just to complain because life has hit you with one too many punches.

Prioritize learning over earning.

As you progress through your career, the single most valuable currency you have is your knowledge and experience. But not all experiences are created equally. Not all experiences yield the same amount of learning over time.

Working 9–5 every day doesn’t equate to 8 hours of learning every day. Learning requires deliberate practice. Unfortunately, most of what we do at work involves doing what we already know. That’s not learning.

How your career would develop depends on an awful lot of luck. The most successful people in our industry get to where they are after being in the right place at the right time. Which gave them opportunities to solve problems that create huge amounts of learning in return.

But you still have a lot of control, especially in the job opportunities that you pursue. You should pick opportunities that will likely challenge you the most and create the most amount of learning. Don’t worry about earning $10k less a year at this stage of your career. Those valuable learnings that you collect along the way would easily double the difference later in your career. And you’ll have a much happier and successful career!

Also, take learning into your own hands, and learn things that interest and excite you. If the cloud is your thing, then take advantage of the fact that it’s super cheap to experiment with new ideas and technologies.