Stop Babysitting Your Team: Let your team evolve!
Don't limit your team career growth! (especially juniors)
A painting titled "Why so many people don't evolve appropriately in their career!" (mostly juniors and mids, but sometimes also seniors) ... Here is why!
The best senior engineers are not strong in pure technical skills, but are also outstanding in tech-related stuff, mainly in making people around them get better and step up! (especially juniors)
There is a clear pattern in the tech industry: a person's entire career is heavily affected by their first job! If their first job was great and they worked with smart, open, humble, and supportive people, their career later will be much better, and vice versa.
And what helped juniors the most was that seniors gave them a chance to move forward (of course, juniors still need to make a lot of effort on their side).
So, dear senior, seniority is not just technical! It's also about working with people and making sure they are moving forward! In the following sections, we will cover some takeaways.
The following 4 top points are essential for seniors and juniors equally!
1. Junior development could be started from day one
There are many seniors treating juniors like "babies"! They always think the juniors are still young and inexperienced in everything. And they must wait a bit longer before getting involved in some tasks.
People's development could start from day one. And as a senior, you don't need to wait to support juniors around you. And juniors need to learn "how to think" to solve problems instead of just looking for a solution to a problem. It's kinda like "MVP pyramid", where you have a small chunk from many skills instead of a big chunk from a single skill.
2. No need to be a senior to start developing people
There is no correlation between your experience and developing people. You don't need to wait till you are a senior to support the people around you. One junior or mid in a group of juniors could enhance the whole group significantly.
That could be done by asking questions, supporting others, or making a competitive state in the group. You could be this person or find someone else to pair with them and proceed.
3. If there are no seniors to support you, find them!
We all know that life is not perfect. And it's hard to find that great senior who could help and support you in your career. Many strong seniors technically could not be that informative or interested/reasonable in people's development at all.
Whatever the reason, that great senior you are looking for may not be in your current company! So you need to find them. You need to find a mentor outside your current company to guide your career.
Again, life is not that perfect! In reality, finding that mentor is hard; if you find one, it's harder to keep in touch with them for a long time. So you will mostly need to see more than one person and learn the best from each one.
4. Don't wait for someone to make your personal development plan
Last but not least, a word for juniors ... most of the time, you will need help from seniors to make your personal development plan; however, you don't need to wait, and you can make your own. You need to put more effort into making one by asking more seniors and collecting all the data, which could help you build your plan.
Those were some of the points that few people focus on; it’s important to emphasize them.
Thanks for your time, and hope you enjoy the journey! Here is a kickoff checklist:
📃 Read the frequently asked questions page (it has much valuable information).
⭐ Star the project repo on GitHub (for better visibility).
🌐 Join the Telegram group (for interactive communication).
Happy DevOpsing ♾️