Amy Blankenship
2 min readMar 27, 2022

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The only point I 100% agree with is not giving credit. Managers love, love, love to see developers giving credit to the people they hired, so it's in everyone's interest to spread credit as much as you humanly can.

So here's the but...

In most companies, senior developers are senior because of their coding skills, not their people skills, not their documentation skills, and not their training skills. They are there to code features under a tight timeline, and if they can take you from absolutely green to somewhat competent along the way, that's great. But they don't see that as their job and management more or less agrees with them.

When they take a feature off you and do it themselves, it's because they already wasted 2 weeks trying to coach you to the point of producing something useful (or worse, you spent two weeks saying it would be done tomorrow and then you finally check in some crap and then they spend two weeks trying to coach you to produce something usable.

It takes way more time to get someone else to do something right than it does to just do it, and meanwhile there are dependencies that can't be written because they had to leave a hole for your task.

Five junior developers don't produce as much value as one senior developer. They're a net loss to the team, as everyone's time is sucked up trying to make tasks easy enough for them (or worse, management pretends they're as competent as everyone else and lets them pick up tasks they don't at all have the skills to do). The problem is that management is often completely blind to this reality, and they still hold seniors responsible to finish their own tasks in time even if their tasks were planned with the understanding your task would be done last month. At the end of the day, their first responsibility is to get the features out reasonably on time, and if they take any time to coddle you, be grateful.

Most companies just don't have any understanding of how people learn, and they are not going to make allowances for you. That's not the fault of the seniors--it's their reality, too. If you really need a curated experience, go to work for a company that does something training-related (like an LMS vendor, an elearning content producer, etc.). They will have at least some understanding that just because you've been to coding bootcamp it doesn't mean you can play in the big leagues. Good luck.

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Amy Blankenship
Amy Blankenship

Written by Amy Blankenship

Full Stack developer at fintech company. I mainly write about React, Javascript, Typescript, and testing.

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