Make Space for Juniors
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
Let's start the second half of November with a restful weekend. I hope you had a restorative weekend.
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Things I enjoyed in the past week
TBM 389: Overthinker! Another great piece by John Cutler, on being labeled an overthinker.
Complex Systems and the Messy Nine w/special guests Dave Woods and John Allspaw is a great podcast episode about complex systems and resilience engineering.
Death Valley is Not What You Think, a cool YouTube video about a National Park I've been wanting to visit for a few years now.
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion*, I started this book after listening to a review that it was about grief.
In recent weeks, I've been thinking about teams that don't make space for juniors to grow.
I've seen a few patterns repeat themselves
Manager only picking up the most senior people for projects, this might happen in a setting where multiple (or all) projects are "priority" and managers are forced to promise specific dates and not miss them. So they need the most knowledgeable in that domain to deliver.
The other pattern I see is that senior engineers are either proactive or the team might not have enough work to split, so they often pick work to keep themselves busy.
This creates a dependency on them, but doesn't allow juniors any space to pick up these tasks.
In the first case, it is a self-defeating prophecy as the juniors never acquire the domain knowledge to be picked up for these urgent projects.
What tends to happen is that juniors get bored and leave for other teams or even companies, losing valuable knowledge and continuing to rely on the senior engineers who remain.
Managers should look out for these things, and try to make senior engineers pair up on important projects or mentor on the side to keep bringing juniors up to speed.
Other times, managers due to pressure from the stakeholders feel they're in a position to always push the seniors forward, and leave the juniors to their own devices.
These sort of behaviors, if not manageable at the team level should be called at the next level, like a director.
These are some of the behaviors that are hard to change, as other stakeholders might request that X or Y engineer always participate in certain projects. Like "we need Oscar on this project".
So might be beyond of talking with your director, and it might be in the realm of your director or above should solve the way of working.
I don't think we should shy away from calling out this behavior. It benefits all of us to keep growing as a team and spread knowledge around. Depending on a single person ends up being a recipe for disaster.
Your turn!
How do you make space for Juniors to learn and grow? Have you given this a thought in the past? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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