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Why Every Junior Developer Needs A Senior Developer

SeattleDataGuy on September 29, 2019

The concept of mentorship of a senior developer to a junior developer is often looked at as beneficial to the junior developer. However, pairing a ...
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SeattleDataGuy

Personally, I do think the senior developer gains better communication skills as well as possible leadership skills.

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Nathan K. Campbell

and over time, hopefully another senior

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Fran C. • Edited

And not just that, you gain better understanding of a lot of concepts.

There are things you don't realise until you mentor or help with mentoring someone, but there are a lot of concepts which you think you completely understand and yet you can't explain properly.

Mentoring improves both your communication skills, as SeattleDataGuy pointed out, + your understanding of those concepts. And not only that but forces you to continously challenge the practices you KNOW for a fact that are beneficial vs. the ones you just follow for a mere sense of inertia.

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Jenna King

I wish I had a senior developer to work with on some projects in my current position! Currently, we all work on our own projects and at times, as a junior dev, it's been a daunting experience. It's hard to ask for help when the senior devs don't have visibility on your code work, your daily pushes to the main repo and so on, so they aren't able to jump in and offer input.

Now I look at my old code and cringe, and try to refactor when the time allows.

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SeattleDataGuy

Sounds about right! It is usually nice to at least get a Sr. developer to look at it before you push it to the main repo..but sometimes that just isn't the case.

Sidenote, if you're old code doesn't make you cringe. You're not learning :).

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Jenna King

That's what I tell myself to get through bad days! :)

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Adam Bulmer

I think it also benefits the Senior Engineer. It's not like they've reached the end game in their career and they will want to progress at some point.

Mentoring and pairing junior members of the team will help them push their career forward as communicating clearly and effectively is important the more senior you become as your stakeholders aren't always going to be technical.

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SeattleDataGuy

I agree!

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Abdulfatai Suleiman

Yeah have a Senior developer is an advantage for you as a Junior developer. Because the senior developer have the experience have worked on many projects pass through many Errors, So its really a big advantage

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Jesse Phillips

It is interesting that you mention learning things take longer and knowing when you can't do it alone.

The fact that you are not alone is one of the main reasons for all of that. Small projects grow because the need to be more accessible, not just the UI but how to update and change the UI.

Don't get me wrong, doing it alone does not mean smooth sailing, but it does aliminate initial challenges.

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Selena

Great article! In many ways senior developers have probably gone all through the pitfalls of wasted time and money that they could keep new juniors from doing. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s pretty obvious how it could save time and money down the road, so it’s hard to see why more companies wouldn’t want to make sure their juniors have guidance!

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Carl Anderson

There's also the aspect that teaching makes you to organize your knowledge, and fill in any blanks in your own understanding.

Teaching a junior will make the junior and the senior better.

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SeattleDataGuy

Also true!

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Timothy McGrath

Good points. I wish I had a senior dev to help me out when I started. They just threw me into the fire.

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SeattleDataGuy

I think it is more common than most of us hope!

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Sajjadkhan12

thanks for sharing such a beautiful information

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Riley Griffin

Anyone able to give input on how to get a senior dev, if you a junior In a position without much guidance