Fostering a welcoming, supportive, and productive environment for junior developers

In this presentation, Bobbilee Hartman and I share our experiences starting out in the web development industry and provide some actionable advice for ensuring junior developers are provided with a work environment that’s equipped to help them level up, and become happy and productive members of a team as quickly as possible.

Beginning a career as a developer can be a daunting and overwhelming experience and the diverse paths we each took to land our first role in the industry enable us to provide valuable insight on how to nurture new developers and ensure their skills and confidence continue to grow.

We cover what worked for us but we don’t just share our own experiences; we conducted interviews with a number of current junior developers, seniors with experience working with and mentoring juniors, and business owners and directors who have the ultimate say in deciding whether or not to hire juniors in the first place. We wanted to find out about their experiences either as a junior or working with one, what did and didn't work, and what they'd do differently in the future.

Transcript

1. Fostering a welcoming, supportive, and productive environment for junior developers Bobbilee Hartman & Dylan Wolff RubyConf Philippines 2017
2. “But wait, why are there two of you?”
3. Becoming a successful developer isn't a solo endeavour
4. It’s important to be part of an inclusive, supportive team
5. Who are we?
6. Bobbilee Hartman
8. • Ruby & Rails developer • Mentor at Bloc (bloc.io) • Rails Camp USA organizer • bobbileehartman.com / @bobbilee19
9. My experience starting out
10. Didn’t feel involved
11. “She still doesn’t get this? She still doesn’t remember this?”
12. Now have responsibility, no longer feel isolated
13. Dylan Wolff
15. • Junior developer at Icelab • Location-independent since January 2016 • dylanwolff.com / @dgwolff
16. My experience starting out
17. Most junior hire by Icelab
18. Thrown into the deep end early
19. Open, honest feedback = better process for future junior hires
20. Why do we need juniors?
22. Skill vacuum
23. People leave the industry entirely
24. The best way to grow a company is like a pyramid: from the bottom
25. Not being open to hiring juniors…
26. Narrows the talent funnel considerably
27. Hampers diversity efforts
28. Short term gain but potentially longer term pain
29. You forego the opportunity to “mold” a junior to the company’s perspective
30. Without the right environment, juniors will…
31. Become quiet and isolate themselves (watch for this, it's the first sign!)
32. Get discouraged, frustrated, anxious
33. Feel imposter syndrome trickle in
34. Be less productive
35. Our goals for this talk
36. Help you retain and grow junior developers
37. Make investing in junior developers more rewarding and less scary!
38. Our approach
39. Interview people on both sides: junior developers and those who hire and mentor them
40. What we found out
41. Culture
42. The whole team needs to be on board
43. Making mistakes is OK
44. Seniors are proactive about checking in
45. Have seniors chat about their struggles!
46. “I just solved a really cool problem, want to pair with me, I’ll show you what I did?”
47. Share other interests - not just all work, all the time
48. Open and honest communication
49. Responsibility
50. Ownership of a discrete feature
51. Leading standup/ meetings
52. Representing the company at meetups
53. Support
54. Pairing
55. Don’t let them isolate themselves
56. Training budget!
57. Learning Lab
58. Keep them focused on their own growth
59. Feedback
60. Regular, scheduled one- on-ones
61. Code reviews
62. Encourage juniors to "timebox" any problems
63. How difficult is this question (1-10)?
64. To sum up
65. Cultivating the right culture
66. Empowering juniors with responsibility
67. Providing ongoing support
68. Keeping the lines of communication open with regular feedback
69. Thanks! ✌