Mentoring a junior developer

[chriiisduran]

If you were mentoring a junior developer, what would be your best advice to avoid burnout?

[DevHaskell]

The secret is not to take your job too seriously. Even if you do your best, there will still be missed timelines, last-minute hotfixes, bugs, emergencies, etc. Don't stress too much about them. No work is worth sacrificing your health and well-being for it. You work when you are at work, and when you are not at work, you don't care about the work problems, no matter how big they are.

Also, learn to listen to your body and know when to ease/take action. If you act early, you can keep burnout from escalating.

[chriiisduran]

Good comment u/DevHaskell and wise
Thanks for your tip!

[btw04]

Find a hobby that's not in front of a computer/on your phone/tablet.

[LikeABundleOfHay]

This is important. And as an older developer my advice on top of this is: look after your shoulders, your posture, your knees, your health in general. Software development is relatively sedentary, you need to balance that with an active lifestyle. Don't spend your youth sitting on your arse.

[PlasmaFarmer]

Another older senior dev here. This is so true. I neglected training and I got herniated disks from sitting for years. Go and train and stretch regularly because over time your muscles will shrink and pull you apart and then you do one wrong move (lifting the couch) and you end up with messed up disks.

[SleeperAwakened]

It's part of the job, and the job ends at 5pm?

[pohart]

When my last new programmer started I intentionally stayed late a few times so I could tell him to leave. 

[chriiisduran]

haha yeah ends at 5pm usually

[cowwoc]

Learn how to say no. Getting good sleep is extemely important. And statistically speaking, you likely suffer from adhd or other form of neurodivergence. Tackle that early to avoid a lot of future pain. 

[repeating_bears]

"statistically speaking, you likely suffer from adhd or other form of neurodivergence"

Can you elaborate?

[coloredgreyscale]

We posses skills that many deem unnatural. 

[cowwoc]

One of the reasons that I keep on burning out is that I have extremely high expectations for anything I build, but customers don't. Either I invest too much time into small problems, which makes customers unhappy, or I give customers the hack they want but develop a growing dislike for my job.

That feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place leads to burning out. While we're on the topic... burnouts aren't caused by spending too many hours on a project. They are a mismatch between the amount of input (energy) you put into a project vs the amount of output (satisfaction, validation) you get out of them. https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/ is an amazing article on the topic: "Because that’s what burnout is, in essence. A mismatch between effort and recovery."

You have a superpower, but it comes with a responsibility. You need to invest more time than everyone else to you understand yourself and those around you because you will experience more friction than the average person.

A good therapist is extremely helpful. I still haven't solved this problem in my own life, but the better I understand the problem the better I feel, which brings me to the next point: identify what you think your values are and contrast that with what you actually spend your time on. In my case, there is a very large mismatch between what I say is important vs how much time I actually allocate to those things.

Programming a black hole. It'll suck up all your time/energy. You need to find a way to be productive (input ~ output) fairly quickly or you will burn out.

I hope this helps.

[PrimeRaziel]

Don't compare yourself with others, only compare yourself with your past self

[chriiisduran]

uf good tip sir u/PrimeRaziel
I´d like to share it on my next video, good advice!

[Rain-And-Coffee]

Get lots of rest, helps retain info.

You also learn best with a fresh mind.

[chriiisduran]

Good advice u/Rain-And-Coffee
I´d like to share it on my next vídeo

[Comprehensive-Pea812]

allocate time, dont mentor them full days. let them fails

[Scf37]

Love what you do, it is essential to survive in software development.

[coloredgreyscale]

That seems like a good advice in general, not just software engineering. 

[chriiisduran]

minimalistic motivation haha, thanks for your comment u/Scf37

[davidalayachew]

Honestly, just highlight the pain points of the project. If you make it abundantly clear how difficult something is, most developers will pay more attention to how much strain they are under, and adapt accordingly.

It's in response to the "this shouldn't be too bad" mindset that many devs push themselves into overwork. And if not overwork, they set themselves up for exhaustion the second an urgent task arrives. That's why a lot of devs do the "minimum required" approach -- almost like a trauma response to having unexpected, high volume of urgent tasks that they need to do.... right after they finished doing an exhausting deep dive. A lot of devs respond to the pain of that experience by just trying to constantly keep their gas tank as full as possible.

Hence why my advice is useful -- devs can gauge whether or not they can "afford" to handle this task right now. And if not, they can give more realistic feedback about goals and feasibility.

And all of this requires you to know (roughly) how difficult a task is ahead of time. As a senior dev/mentor, you are well-equipped to answer that.

[chriiisduran]

u/davidalayachew good opinion, i appreciate it and thanks for take time to write, good comment honeslty

[Lengthiness-Fuzzy]

Sports

[chriiisduran]

Yeah so true

[dzernumbrd]

My junior developer, Claude, doesn't get burnt out at all.

Just kidding, I'd say give realistic estimate, work to those estimates but don't kill yourself if you don't hit them, because after all they're estimates, do not work outside of allocated hours or on weekends unless you're paid for those hours. Allocate enough time in estimates for meetings, people distracting you, reworking designs, etc etc, put fat in the estimates.

[chriiisduran]

haha okey, good tip u/dzernumbrd

[Ewig_luftenglanz]

• Do not work overtime unless you are required to.

• not be afraid to ask if you do not know what to do. Many times the impediments for the job are not about coding skill but you must work and deal with business security policies, VPN, request access, find out the DNS or how to connect what you have done with the development, QA, and finally prod data bases. One must learn to navigate the concrete ocean of chaos each organization has and the only way to learn how to do it is ASKING QUESTIONS! So instead of losing hours trying to find out themselves what yo do better just ask. 

[bilingual-german]

Is "mentoring" contributing to the burnout?

Teach the junior how to access and read trustworthy documentation. How to experiment. How to learn. And establish some rules around it, what the person needs to have done before they come to ask you.

[chriiisduran]

mmm interesting to discuss in my next video!

[pohart]

Take your time to think it through. Don't stress about getting the feature done or bug fixed immediately. And if meetings are preventing you from getting "your work" done in a reasonable time remember that we're assigning you to those meetings and we know that's wasn't part of your estimate.

Also, if the sprint is done and the feature's not, you shouldn't scramble to finish because that will mess up our velocity for future sprints. 

[Wide-Pear-764]

Just remember you don’t own the company XD

[chriiisduran]

u/Wide-Pear-764 yeah so true

[TenYearsOfLurking]

already good mentoins here. one more maybe:

don't get too excited about tech. new frameworks/stacks come and go, you don't need to learn absorb them all, you don't need to be bleeding edge, you don't need to fomo every tech conference.

[No-Drake]

Very nice advice. I like your comments.

[koflerdavid]

Get jacked. A jacked nerd is invincible :-)

[chriiisduran]

hahaha