Junior Dev Ego Death

You're fresh out of college. 4 years of sweat and tears, good grades, and many $$$ spent on AI coding assistants. During your internship, you felt like a god because you completed your onboarding training faster than the others.

It's time to prove yourself out in the real world. You've secured a job right after graduating and join a team of young driven devs. Life is great. It's time to show what you're made of 😎.

You create your first PR, you're feeling good. 10 minutes pass.

Some comments!

"Why did you do x? y would have been much simpler."

"This part doesn't really make sense"

"Is this used?"

Wait what? What just happened. Your world is crumbling. Head is spinning. Are you stupid? Did you pass university by chance? Are you a fraud? They're humiliating you, but...

...they're not!

What's really happening is you are receiving valuable, granular feedback on all the code you are writing!! That is the most valuable thing anyone could offer you as a junior dev.

No one is out to get you!

If you haven't worked as part of a real team before, it can be easy to mistake feedback or advice as criticism, but it's important to realise everyone is trying to help each other. The best way to learn is from each other - you'll be sharing your own knowledge with the team in no time.

So how do you shift your mindset and make the most of this feedback? Here's some tips for leaving your pride at the door and becoming a based junior dev:

1. Never assume malice
   • A message that might read rude to you reads completely normal to others (Async communication is hard)
2. Don't blindly defend your work just because it's yours.
   • Your implementation could be creative but might not be optimised
3. It's a criticism of the implementation, NOT an attack on your character
   • Comments like the example ones earlier can seem like an attack, but they're not and are never intended to be taken as such.

Conclusion

As a junior dev, your job isn’t to write perfect, production-ready, optimized code right away. Your job is to learn, adapt, and grow. Absorb knowledge like a sponge, ask questions, and don’t shy away from feedback - it’s the most valuable tool for improvement. Every developer, no matter their experience, gets feedback. The key is embracing it and using it to become a better engineer 😌