Many senior software developers out there think about what to do with their profession after several years of experience. Some could get into management, and others could consider a consultation. Senior developers don’t get involved in detailed code reviews when they reach such a position. Still, they are more likely to train their team on navigating their career trajectory. By mentoring your team, you’ll understand what motivates it and upskill it in a more technical direction. Ensuring your client’s success means having an awareness of the team you’re working with, including junior staff members.
Mentoring is a corresponding and collaborative at-will relationship that usually occurs between a senior and junior employee to motivate the mentee’s growth, learning and career development. Usually, the mentor and the mentee are within the same organisation and emphasise organisational goals, career development, culture and work-life balance. Mentoring is always about empathy and clarity; a mentor acts as a guide and supports the juniors to focus and learn. Mentoring not only helps the mentee but can also extensively impact the world. It generates a ripple effect where you determine someone’s mental models and approaches to code in the future.
Through mentorship, junior developers quickly learn the company’s culture and processes, which in turn helps them develop their skills and deliver high-quality products. Besides making you a professional or levelling your skills, mentorship helps you grow as a person. As your mentee relationship develops, you begin to see each other as trusted friends and allies. Mentors will help shape your personal goals, create strong relationships with others and work effectively in the office.
A software developer mentor could be someone with more experience in software development and helps you to reach your goals both at work and personal life. These people understand how one wrong decision can affect a project and the entire company in the future.
TIPS FOR MENTORING JUNIOR DEVELOPERS
Mentoring usually takes time, and with the suitable approaches toward achieving it, mentoring can yield substantial results for both the mentees and the entire company. Here are five tips to utilise when mentoring junior developers in a company.
Start Small
Starting out in a new codebase or company is always exciting and scary. As a mentor, understand how overwhelming this can be for a junior developer initially. When you’re assigned a new mentee, they’re either a new hire or an existing employee just joining the project. Either way, you must first download the course code and run it on their local computer. Prepare a not-so-critical task that they can begin with, and then move on to the heavier tasks. Assigning junior developers tasks that require their undivided attention and focus on the project is a valid method. Still, you have to supervise them and select jobs that align with their capabilities. Onboarding documentation and project ReadMe files become quickly outdated. Therefore, when a new developer joins the team, ask him to update any dead links or add all issues found to the troubleshooting section in the project” s ReadMe. That way, the mentee familiarise themselves with your git flow. Ensure not to overwhelm your new mentee with a lot of information. Let them embrace baby steps.
Action Tip: Prepare a simple task that your new mentee can start working on to introduce them to the codebase. This assignment shouldn’t be critical and shouldn’t interfere with anyone else.
Do Code Reviews
If you want your junior developers to improve their skills and write better code, tell them exactly what to improve. Ask them how they think they can improve or if there is anything you can do to help them. Reviews put things in perspective and reflect what the junior developer has learnt. Code reviews help you get an insight into their coding practices and provide the foundation to offer constructive feedback. If the junior developers feel worried about having their code reviewed, then let them know it is an ordinary thing. And something they’ll have to face throughout their careers, not just in the beginning. So, the rationale of code reviews is for junior developers to upgrade their skills in coding so they can work confidently.
Action Tip: Let your junior developer develop and test the code before reviewing it. Then, know what to look for during the code review. Don’t review the code for longer than sixty minutes. Check not more than 400 lines at a time. After, give feedback that helps and communicate goals and expectations.
Think about Your Objectives
Now that you know and understand where your junior developers are starting from, have a specific idea of what you want your team to meet. A few common objectives for junior developers are to increase their understanding of the backend frameworks or the ability to create features individually and non-technical skills such as communication and collaborating more with teammates. Therefore, put into consideration what the mentees need to learn for them to meet the set objective. It’s usually difficult for the newer developer to know what they don’t. It’s, therefore, your duty to ensure they learn the necessary stuff. Mentoring is about outcomes; that’s to say, the junior developer has understood this and can do this rather than a set of tasks to perform periodically.
Action Tip: Generate a list of specific skills you want your junior developers to learn and acquire. These skills have to be technical and non-technical, such as testing and reviewing code, debugging, communication, collaboration and leadership.
Tailor Your Approach
Usually, the junior developers you mentor over time will definitely have different modes of learning that are most effective. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to find and design an approach that will work for them. After all, you’re the mentor. Some of the standard modes that different junior developers learn the most include;
- The self-based study, here, you refer them to some courses or books about a specific topic.
- Discussion, in this approach, learning goes on through a series of back-and-forth questions and answers.
- Pair programming, this is where two developers work on the same code. This approach can help your junior developer advance their skills with a mentor or a fellow junior developer. This technique is usually done through the duties of the driver and navigator. Where the driver executes the navigator’s instructions, asks questions and provides suggestions.
- Once in a while, teaching asks your junior developers to present what they know about a particular topic. The presentation usually forces them to understand better.
Action Tip: When the new developers come in, take some time to observe them. See how they teach themselves, and watch the different modes that they learn the most and quickly. Then create a mentoring approach that aligns with their methods of learning.
Prepare an Onboarding Guide
To optimise your time, prepare an onboarding guide to help explain the basic questions from your junior developers or mentees. You’ll probably spend an extensive period creating and preparing it. Still, once it’s done, it can be essential and reused in the future.
Action Tip: An onboarding guide might include the following questions;
- How to set up the development machine, including the software that needs to be installed?
- How to set up the project, including dependency installation or how to run the project and the environment variables to set up?
- Who to consult when problems are encountered?
- FAQs for quick solutions to strange problems
Conclusion
There are thousands and thousands of junior developers in the labour market. Yet, you only have a chance to select a few and mentor them to greatness, both in coding and in personal life. When you get the opportunity to mentor a junior developer, try your best to be conscious that they’re just beginning. Don’t be hard, and don’t be soft either. Try to ease them into the process with a structured training approach designed to align with their current skills and capabilities without the developer overburdening.
Mentoring is usually demanding, but still, the efforts you put into mentoring junior developers will be worth it since you’ll have a well-trained developer for the company. The engineer will be grateful for helping them level both their work and personal lives.
