Resources for the junior engineer
Lately I’ve been asked for resources for those new to software engineering. This produces a funny feeling that I could write a lot of commentary about, but I’ll cut that short and cough up some good links to reference while it’s on my mind. Note: this is particularly tailored to nontraditional women and minorities entering tech because that’s what’s close to my heart.
Problem-solving and approaching learning as a beginner:
“Get better at programming by learning how things work” by Julia Evans aka @b0rk
“Learn one thing at a time” by Julia Evans aka @b0rk
“How to be a good mentee” - Radhika Morabia
On getting to mid-level
“From Junior to Mid, 20 things I learned in my the past 6 months” from Radhika Morabia’s email newsletter
I asked for permission to share this - see pdf embed below
This is a specific, somewhat ambitious approach and not meant as iron-clad, but it sets good goalposts for leveling up from beginner once you’ve gotten past the initial firehose phase
On mindset and imposter syndrome:
Finding the right environment
There’s a twitter thread I haven’t been able to hunt down (pity!) that talks about how to give junior engineers the right guidance. The crux of it is that people are going to fail, inevitably, at finding the right balance between asking for too much help and asking for too little help. The solution to this is to cultivate the psychological safety on the team to give people the grace and room to fail (perhaps erring on the side of asking too much), and provide gentle feedback on ways they could be more resourceful.
If someone asks for information without showing due diligence, ask them “Have you done your due diligence? Did you research xyz?”
The point of sharing this with junior engineers is to give them a sense of what appropriate guidance and a supportive team looks like, and hopefully encourage them not to internalize shame if they happen to mess up or find this balance tricky. Also, mentorship and support for juniors in the industry just isn’t great and is often times lacking or deficient. Juniors should be aware of this so they know the problem isn’t theirs, and theirs alone.
On dealing with workplace friction potentially with an immigrant / c-ptsd background:
Extra reading (haven’t listened to these, but they seem nice):
Some of the tweets above embedded for convenience:
