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Discussion on: How to ask senior devs for help?

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Heather Williams

From my own journey I learnt the following useful things:

  • No question is too dumb. You may laugh about the silly thing you asked later but ask it. I once had to have someone else point out to me that my external screen was not switched on and that is my laptop appeared to not be working.
  • Read everything you can find about dev and in particular the tech you work with. Experiment with it, almost anything you do can be undone if you do break something. I have deleted crucial things before but learnt a lot in fixing the trail of destruction.
  • Be willing to learn. Take notes if that helps or find other ways of learning. After each project you work on summarise what you learnt.
  • Communicate. Let the senior devs know you want to learn but ask them to tell you if you are asking too many questions or bothering them too much. Usually though they are happy to help and teach others.
  • If you work at a company where mentorship is not important to the company and they do not really care about how you progress then consider finding somewhere else to work.
  • Keep track of your skills and the sort of things you are needing to ask, over time you start seeing progression and that helps you realise you are levelling up.

In short junior devs should have a good grasp of the basics of the programming language they work in, if you are asking questions about things like types (strings, ints, booleans) or writing basic logic then perhaps you need to revisit that and get good at that. But you cannot be expected to know about big architectural things or how to make a brand new table in a database, those things come with time and experience. By the end of the first year being a junior dev I should be able to give you e.g. a well spec'ed sign up form and you can implement just the form part with little guidance. But if I gave you a spec for the entire sign up process on a website I would expect to need to guide you through some steps in the process.