hubris and humbleness

I saw Bonnie Mattson give a talk called "Caring for your junior dev & Project management answers" at Refresh Austin's Tuesday night meeting at Buffalo Billiards. As you might guess this talk was about how things may (hopefully) get less painful for junior developers. Ms. Mattson is herself a junior developer like yours truly and in the name of boosting her own street cred in her talk she had participants complete a questionnaire beforehand which is not a trick I've seen before. My favorite quote from her outside analysis was: "A good junior developer has the right mix of hubris and humbleness." The feedback collected into her slideshow showed what were arguably some patterns that one could speak to.

• Junior developers can fill the talent gap in our current drought of senior heavy hitters wherein there are more jobs than talent to fill them.
• As a junior developer you will often fail and feel awful. You will get imposture syndrome. A good culture can combat imposture syndrome, so don't be rude or condescending or mean in the name of sabotaging such a culture.
• The stereotype threat is a circumstance in which someone doesn't see themselves reflected in their peers. A diverse culture is the solution. Diversity makes new hires quicker in becoming comfortable and thus quicker to adapt and thus quicker in becoming productive.
• It is important to have a training budget and, more specifically, it is important for senior developers to set aside allocated time for mentoring as their mentoring is going to be compromised if they are expected to be producing full-time.
• A college professor cannot just do undergraduate work. He/she has to teach classes. If a senior developer isn't a good teacher, maybe he/she isn't senior.
• Bonnie liked documentation (good documentation), pairing, and code reviews.
• Encouragement and positive feedback are important and perhaps even criticisms should be wrapped in compliment sandwiches wherein the meat of criticism is preceded by and followed by some encouragement and affirmation.