5 Moments When a Junior Backend Developer Grew the Most on the Job
I joined as a new grad last year, and it's been about a year and a half now. Looking back, there were moments where my growth curve really took a sharp turn upward. I also share this with juniors, so I figured I'd write it up.
1. When I truly took code reviews to heart
Things changed the moment I started asking "why do you write it this way?" instead of just saying "Okay, I'll fix it."
2. When I experienced an incident firsthand
Those 30 minutes at dawn when I got the alert and rolled back taught me more than a year of studying. lol
3. The habit of checking logs and metrics first
- No guessing when an error occurs
- Check the dashboard first
- Form a hypothesis, then verify
4. Side projects
Company code has plenty of safety nets, so the experience of deploying something all on my own hit different.
5. Writing
Design docs, commit messages, PR descriptions. The people who write these well are the ones whose careers ultimately take off.
9 answers
I feel the same way. I can relate.
I really agree with checking the logs first in #3. At first, I also always dug into the code first, but after a senior told me, "Open the dashboard first," my debugging speed at least doubled. When you fix code based on guesses, you often touch something that was fine and make things blow up even more.
In #1, the part "the moment you start asking why it was written that way" is great lol. But the catch is: what do you do if you ask and still aren't convinced?
Isn't #2 case by case? Just because you go through an incident doesn't mean you'll grow—it only sticks if you do a proper retrospective afterward.
If I can add one thing about code reviews: asking "What issues could this cause?" instead of "Why did you do it this way?" tends to get you much more comfortable answers. The reviewer doesn't get defensive either. I really paid for not knowing this when I was a junior.
Any source? If someone with 1.5 years of experience wrote this up, it's just a personal retrospective, not a general principle, I'd say.
I agree, especially #2. Once you've dealt with an early-morning outage, it really opens your eyes lol.
I'm not so sure about #5. Rather than people who write well having better careers, isn't it that people whose careers are going well just end up with more occasions to write? Feels like correlation being read as causation.
Side projects are a really big deal, but these days just work alone is enough to overwhelm me, so I can't bring myself to start one. Instead, building a small bot with a stack we don't use at work helped a lot. Even if it's small, I think the key is doing everything yourself all the way through deployment.