Everyone tells junior developers to “just build projects.”
Build more.
Practice more.
Code every day.
It sounds reasonable — but it leaves out something important.
After talking to a lot of juniors, a pattern keeps showing up:
they’ve built projects, but they still don’t feel ready for real work.
Not because they’re lazy.
Not because they lack motivation.
But because they’re learning alone.
The problem with learning in isolation
Most junior developers learn by building solo projects.
That means:
- no shared codebase
- no pull requests
- no code reviews
- no one to explain decisions to
- no feedback loop
You write code, it works ("Hey it's working on my machine!"), and… that’s it.
There’s no signal telling you:
- Is this good?
- Is this how teams actually do it?
- Would this survive in a real codebase?
So even after finishing multiple projects, something still feels missing.
What real work actually looks like
In a real development team, coding is only part of the job. A lot of the work happens around the code:
- planning tasks
- understanding the client problems
- breaking work into tickets
- making tradeoffs
- working in a shared repository
- opening pull requests
- reviewing someone else’s code
- explaining why a decision was made
These are skills you’re expected to have. but they’re rarely taught.
Tutorials focus on syntax.
Solo projects focus on output.
Neither prepares you for collaboration.
The gap no one talks about
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Many junior developers aren’t missing technical ability.
They’re missing work-like experience.
They’ve never practiced:
- touching code they didn’t write
- getting feedback on unfinished work
- adjusting based on reviews
- learning from mistakes in a team setting
And when the job market is tight, that gap becomes painfully visible.
Why this matters more than ever
When I started my own developer journeys, the market was hot.
Breaking into tech was hard — but possible.
The last few years have been very different.
Junior developers are expected to have experience before they’re given a chance to gain it.
That’s a tough position to be in — especially when you’re doing everything “right” and still feel stuck.
Practicing the work before the job
This gap is exactly why we started building PiecesHub.
The idea is simple:
give junior developers a place to practice working the way real teams do — before a job expects it. A place where developers can find small teams and feel safe to learn by doing, together.
Not by replacing tutorials.
Not by grading people.
But by creating space to:
- work together on shared projects
- make decisions
- reflect on what was learned along the way
Because confidence doesn’t come from shipping alone.
It comes from understanding how and why things are done.
I’m curious
If you’re a junior developer:
- What part of “real work” feels the most unclear or intimidating right now?
If you mentor juniors or work with them:
- What do you see them struggle with most when joining a team?
I’d genuinely love to hear your perspective!
If you’re curious what we’re building, this is the platform we mentioned above:
👉 https://pieceshub.com
Top comments (8)
This is actually an pretty interesting view.
I'm an student have been coding for more than 5 or 6 years. And no one would hire or want to work with a 13 or 14 years old kid (I'm 17 now lol). So I mostly entered competitions. And since I lived in not too big and not too small city in Iran, coding was a foreign concept to most. And to those who where actual programmers, They wouldn't want to bother with a kid.
I recently realized that even though I had done lots of projects and entered many many competitions, I never worked with others and when i did, it was just me doing everything and i haven't actually used stuff like git, cause I was always solo. In the past 2 years I have been trying to learn git and enter new environments (like dev.to).
Sorry if this got a bit long, I'm just trying to prove how important of a problem you are pointing out.
and how necessary it is.
Git is the perfect example about topic you don't usually learn by doing all the work alone! When there is also someone else messing around your code base, using git will become more and more important.
And there is also so much to learn about collaboration, managing expectations, reviewing code and planning future tasks and workload.
I hope that you can find community to work with even before you land your first job!
Thanks for the encouragement. I actually did not realize the importance of git until i started entering the coding community online.
For the first few years I just coded and coded, never trying to look online for communities other than stack overflow which was this scary place who had answers to problems.
Last years I have been working with some huge, pretty old code bases. I can tell that git history is freaking life line when you try to understand when and why something has been done 😄
It is also important that your commit messages give enough context. We mostly use ticket ID's in our commit messages. That is very good way to give the context. You can tell more detailed story/comments/root cause analysis in the ticket. When someone is trying to understand things after 5 years, they can check the ticket.
We have been building also this commit-ticket linking in our platform. Code is stored in Github but if you link your repo to the project, you can create branches from tickets and you see all the commits which are related to the specific ticket. It's not as fancy as for Example Jira, but it gives you an idea how things could be handled the way which is working also for bigger teams.
Your platform sounds like a real blessing, however i can't seem to enter it no matter how i do. At first i though it was filtered in Iran so i used Tor browser but even with that pieceshub.com/ is not coming up and isn't loading?
actually i just tried again and it worked. but please make it available without tor and vpn.
I think there might be some restrictions or geoblocking somewhere I'm not aware of.
How sad :(