When I was looking for a job, I was genuinely frustrated that most companies were not willing to consider developers without experience, even for Junior Developer positions. I couldn’t understand what objective advantages an experienced developer had over a beginner.
Now, after a year of working as a commercial developer, I want to share how this year has influenced my perspective.
🧠 Soft Skills
Most beginners, including my past self, significantly underestimate the importance of soft skills in modern software development. Meanwhile, they are critically important for any developer: they improve not only relationships within the team, but also personal productivity.
Effective communication — both with the team and with the business — greatly simplifies requirement clarification and task definition. In my experience, this accounts for around 65% of success in completing any task. Unfortunately, this is one of the skills that is almost impossible to develop without real work experience.
🏗️ Architectural Thinking
Architectural thinking is the ability to consider a task not in isolation, but in the context of the entire system. This skill goes far beyond theoretical knowledge of SOLID, GRASP, or other design patterns. It includes understanding a specific product: which parts of the system are critical, where the bottlenecks are, which areas require scalability, and where additional flexibility would only increase the estimate without providing real value ⚖️.
I believe this type of thinking is primarily formed through working on a specific product and deeply understanding its domain. At the same time, knowledge of general design principles such as SOLID significantly accelerates and simplifies this process.
💼 Business-Oriented Thinking
Lack of business-oriented thinking is a common issue among junior developers and beyond.
By business-oriented thinking, I mean the ability to prioritize company goals over personal preferences — for example, agreeing to speed up the development of a specific feature at the cost of temporarily reducing code quality. This approach often conflicts with internal perfectionism, but it is important to understand that the business does not care how the code is written. It cares about how it works and how much it costs to deliver a feature.
This is especially relevant for startups, where releasing new functionality provides a competitive advantage here and now 🚀. That advantage is directly tied to revenue, which in turn leads to team growth, salary increases, and — in the long term — more time for high-quality technical work.
At the same time, it is important to maintain a delicate balance. Development interests cannot be ignored. If short-term acceleration through smelly code leads to significant slowdowns in the medium term, it is the developer’s responsibility to warn the business about the consequences. Otherwise, this would conflict with the company’s long-term interests in growth and sustainable development.
🌱 Conclusion
A year of commercial development helped me realize that experience is not an innate advantage, but a set of skills and approaches that gradually form through practice. Communication, architectural thinking, and business-oriented thinking all develop over time and do not automatically appear with the first job.
For developers without experience, this means that the gap is not insurmountable 💪. A conscious focus on these aspects, genuine interest in the product, and a willingness to learn can significantly shorten the distance and help transition faster from a beginner to a full-fledged member of the team.
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