Advice for Junior Developers | Ash Furrow
I’ve spent the last few months mentoring a number of junior developers – some who have just started their first job, and some who are still looking for it – and one point keeps coming up in our conversations. It seems general enough to warrant a blog post yet controversial enough to get that social media engagement, so here we go.
(I’m going to describe relationships between businesses and customers and employees, which is going to sound more clinical than my typical blog posts. What follows is just one perspective on the world, and while it is a useful perspective, I encourage you to seek a meaningful life through more than optimizing business relationships.)
Controversial statement, I know. But let me explain. Programming is fun, which is why a lot of us got into professional software development. Getting paid to do something you enjoy sounds great, right? But you’re not getting paid to code just anything; you’re getting paid to code what the business needs. Bug fixes, new features, etc.
Businesses exist to make money. Technology businesses pay programmers to build products which the businesses then sell to customers at a profit. (The same roughly applies to venture-backed companies.) As a software developer, it’s really useful to keep in mind because the sooner you can start thinking about your work in terms of your employer’s business success, the more valuable you’ll be to your employer. This means attaining a bigger impact, sooner, which translates to promotions and raises and professional esteem. Cool!
