Junior developer to Senior developer [5 key values you need]
This article is a set of key values that’ll help you grow from a Jr software developer to a Sr software developer. Unmistakably, these values are influenced by my personal experiences. I do understand that everyone’s path is unique, so I’ll try my best to keep it as generic as possible.
So let’s dive into it -
1. Basics
I see a lot of developers who jump straight into frameworks or libraries without fully grasping the basics of the underlying programming language. I myself am guilty of this and learned the basics of the language I work on (JavaScript) pretty late in the game.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “basics, why?” my work includes the framework, and I have enough understanding of the underlying language and that’s all I need. Well, you might be right, but a lot of key principles of your framework or library are controlled by the principles of the underlying programming language. So having a stronghold on the basics will not only make you understand the framework more richly but will also open up the gates for other frameworks of the same programming language.
2. Know the why?
As you grow in this industry, the tasks assigned to you will undeniably become fussier and fussier. Let me explain with an example — when I started my career, I was handed highly detailed and well-documented tasks. The ‘WHAT needs to be done?’ was clearly defined. Now I pick up features and projects which are much vaguer in nature and I create tasks for myself and other developers out of it. The key value that lets me do it, is understanding the ‘WHY?’ behind every task I pick up.
A clear understanding of why a particular feature is needed and how it impacts the client not only guides me to draft the ‘what’ exactly needs to be done, but also helps me in bringing more value to the feature.
If you’re not clear about the ‘WHY’ of any task you’re picking up, you should always contact the right people first and try and get a clear understanding of it.
3. Business pays the bills
No matter how good of a developer you are, or how cleanly you write code you always need to know that it’s the underlying business that’s paying your bills. So your highly optimized, well-written, and groundbreaking code is of no use if it doesn’t add much value to the business.
In your pursuit to grow as a developer, you should understand the underlying business you’re in. You should be able to see your product from a birds-eye view and know how it fits into the entire ecosystem. Doing this will help you in understanding the high-value tasks and correctly prioritizing them.
4. Consistency
When you are demotivated, push to your threshold level. And when you’re motivated push beyond
Bibaswan Deb (Mindaset Coach)
It’s highly important to be consistent. Make sure you always deliver to your base threshold day in and day out. This does not mean that you grid 12–14 hours every day, doing that will just burn you out. What I mean is to avoid massive ups and downs in your performance every sprint. Having consistent performance will make you more dependable and trustworthy.
Make sure you slowly grow your performance baseline so that you don’t plateau in this industry. There are a lot of ways to do that and we can discuss that in a different article.
Being consistent will get you more respect from your team and you’ll get a lot more high impact and time constricted work.
5. Patience
Change doesn’t come in a day. Start by implementing a little bit of these values. You do not have to be perfect, but a tiny bit of improvement every day will generate massive results over time. Most importantly be patient with yourself.
I want to add more values that helped me to go from Jr developer to a Sr developer. But in the interest of keeping this article short, I’ll be stopping here. Please comment below if you would like me to write a part 2 for this.
Regards,
Srijan Gulati