Hi Friends,

A newer team member told me he worried his first development job would start off as a months-long “tutorial hell.” He’d be relegated to a purgatory of constant “learning” without gaining skills or feeling valued as a worker. It’s a real concern – many companies just don’t know what to do with junior developers.

We intentionally hire juniors. To us they are seen as a huge potential for growth, not a risk. And we get new hires contributing to the codebase in their first week. How?

We partner new hires with more experienced developers for the first two weeks. It’s not a one-sided partnership. Working with a new dev helps existing staff stay focused on writing readable code. From day one, the new partner catches typos and asks clarifying questions. They also start writing production code almost immediately. It takes only hours for the new developer to become a valuable member of the team.

We also ask all new hires to independently review code before it goes into final production. If a new hire doesn’t understand the code they read, we want them to ask questions about it. This helps us make sure we are keeping code readable by every developer on the team, even someone who just started.

Having juniors on the team ensures we continue to write code for people. In the long run, this makes projects more maintainable and robust.

Cheers,

Stephanie