I'm ONLY A Junior Developer - How Can I Work On Leadership?!

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all right it is Saturday November 23rd um just leing CrossFit the topic today we'll get right into it it's a pretty short drive um it's actually on my my recent newsletter onone and I'll do a live stream on this on uh Monday night depending when you're watching this it's either going to be live or it's going to be recorded already so um someone in my Discord Community which by the way uh that's private access if you subscribe to my newsletter like the paid version you get uh Discord access with that so um in the Discord Community uh I really love this question actually so I had a a developer asking like hey I'm still a junior Dev Junior backend Dev and uh I want to know like what I can do to start tapping into like leadership skills like how can I start practicing this

look like I just want to adjust this mic before I get driving here um which I think is cool I think this is something that gets overlooked a lot I think a lot of people in Tech Focus like purely on Tech especially as Juniors because uh you know they're like hey I'm trying to get into the industry to prove myself I just need to show like all my technical skills right and like yes and no you're always going to need the technical skills those don't go away um but I think people often neglect like soft skills right people skills uh I talk a lot about like how communication's valuable how to work in teams and stuff like that but this individual is asking about leadership so um I think something that's interesting about leadership and it's I feel like a misconception is that um I

feel like people associate leadership with like manager role and I talk about this in the newsletter article but uh something I see a lot is like people doing this like manager versus leader kind of thing which I feel like is a really dumb comparison I feel like I understand the point of what they're trying to illustrate but like it's it's just bad in my opinion um and the reason I think it's bad is because I just think it's uh like not the right comparison so I want to introduce this topic by discussing this because I think it's important people will do this comparison will just say like you know managers like tell you what to do like they sit back and like order you around and like basically all these bad traits and then leadership or leaders it's like all the inverse traits like they

Empower you um it's just like all this stuff about giving you autonomy doing good things but the reality is like man like a good manager has good leadership trades um and a bad manager likely does not have good leadership traits I mean that might be bad for other reasons too but the the reason I don't like this is because a manager is like a title SLR right like you don't get promoted into leader position it's not like you get the leadership position and like that's your role now no but you can become a manager like that is a role to manage teams so I think that what's missed here when people do this comparison is uh like leadership is action it is the characteristics that you can but you can embody these are traits my M is so dry about to die here um of

course I don't have any water left it's the end of me um that's it folks video's done uh but yeah the it's it's things that you can practice and things that you do so with that said you don't need to be a manager to demonstrate leadership and in fact fact I would say like maybe people don't realize this maybe a lot of people do which is good but there's an expectation often times that even to become like a senior software engineer as an individual contributor that you're starting to demonstrate leadership traits right so like it's no longer just passively kind of doing the things that you're expected to do in your level it's about being more proactive it's about taking initiative on things so there's two main meta points that I want to drive home for juniors because the question was from a junior software

developer hey I'm Junior how can I start to work on these things so my first recommendation with respect to leadership is being proactive now I don't want this to be confused with just like go get distracted with things that's not my intention so being proactive the Baseline means that you're you're already meeting the expectations of what you're supposed to be doing so how whatever you're discussing with your manager uh or your product owner whatever needs to get done like you're on the same page there things are going well you are doing a good job with that if you're not already doing a good job with that and then you take the recommendation of being proactive the danger there is that it just starts to look like you're distracted like Jimmy doesn't even do what he's supposed to be doing but Jimmy's caught up with all

these other things um you might feel like you're doing a good thing there but like I said it can look like you're distracted it can look like you're not aligned with what the business needs because ideally that's already what you're supposed to be prioritizing so Baseline for being proactive is already be doing a good job with the expected things that you're supposed to be doing now from there let's Dis Let's discuss how to be proactive and I think that entails finding opportunities to drive things forward so for example there and there's so many of these so please don't listen to these examples and be like okay there's three things and that's it I'm driving I can't remember the things I wrote in my newsletter and you'll be able to come up with way more on your own that are way more applicable so just to

give you some examples let's say that um you know you are a junior developer on your team and you've been hearing like listen to pain points right so people on the team have been saying man like um we all value documentation but like the documentation we have sucks it's out of date in particular these Pages like in our Wiki or whatever you're using like it's painful because we want to rely on it and we can't you could be proactive and take the initiative to go say look this is something the team wants I'm going to try driving some effort into making this better I'm going to go out of my way and start trying to contribute to this to update it maybe you'll come up with uh some proposals for how you could keep it up to date going forward like being proactive about this

particular pain point okay maybe to take another example maybe your team uh is really interested in having like a solid testing Suite like automated test and that's been built up over time but like people are struggling with it because they're like man like it's good we have these tests but like they're flaky and when you have flaky tests it's a it's a pain in the ass to trust anything that's going on so then you start to ignore it so again you're a junior Dev and you're hearing this stuff and you don't just have to to be junior by the way but I think these are things you can do as a junior but you're listening to what's going on and going okay like our team really values this I can get behind that but like it seems like there is no one else taking initiative

to try making sure that our tests are not flaky maybe I will be the person to go look into that I can start trying to patch up the flaky tests take an inventory of them um look at some of the patterns being used and saying oh like this is why these things are being flaky now you might be listening to this and saying well Nick like I don't even know the code base like I don't know whatever like that's okay this is extra stuff like clearly no one else is doing it so you could be proactive and go start to look into this now I wouldn't do it entirely in isolation like I wouldn't go Rogue and disappear that's why I was saying also be doing like your your expected work but like going to be proactive and looking into this kind of stuff I

think is a good way to start demonstrating leadership now generally when I talk about leadership it's a lot more people focused but I wanted to talk about being proactive showing initiative because I think that these are types of things that are characteristics that that good leaders have so they don't just sit back and be totally reactionary right you don't just want to react to everything because it constantly feels like you're putting out fires like yes you want to react to things things but if you can be proactive then you can start leading initiatives to go get ahead of the curve so I'm just doing a check about halfway through so based on my drive home so I want to switch gears so being proactive and showing initiative is part one and there's many different ways that you can do that part two is around uh

coaching and helping okay so uh this is one of the primary ones uh when I talk to Engineers that are trying to become more senior uh my expectation and and this is aligned with anywhere I've ever worked so it might not be the same where you are that's okay but in general I think it's pretty common that there is this expectation for more senior software Engineers to be demonstrating uh leadership by way of mentoring and helping other people on the team or across teams so you might say well that's cool Nick but I'm just a junior How can I possibly help other people and it's a great question right because I think that um when you start looking at things this way it's almost like you're you're putting yourself in a box for how much value you add uh which isn't good right I think

it's common I think it's a fair thing that people do because they they might not know otherwise but you don't necessarily have to know tons of things and have tons of experience to be able to help others so to give you a couple of examples and I've seen this happen already this year with new people joining the team so we hired like when I was brought onto the current team I'm on we had hired some other people around the same time and they kind of came on a few of them at the same time and a few others like shortly after and uh regardless of their role right um because there's a mix of like uh junior to intermediate regardless of the role though what was happening is these individuals were onboarding and then ones that had onboarded first were able to help coach and

you know like guide the other new employees so regardless of their level it could have been a junior person helping someone that was multiple levels above them and saying hey I've already gone through this I can help you with it right like toss the level out toss the the the title out like you got to do this thing too no problem let me help you so I think there's plenty of situations like this um it might not be applicable in your situation maybe you've just joined the team and you're like Nick you know everyone else on the team's already been here for 10 years like I can't do that no problem this is for I got to give a general advice right it's impossible for me to know your situation exactly that's one way it's just helping people go through the stuff you've already gone

through as a junior right you got to tap into the things that you can do second part is if there's other Juniors on theam team even if they've been there before you there might be things that you're focused on so pretend you're working on a product or a service and you've been working on some features in a particular area um you might be building some expertise like starting to in some areas and that's great I got to get behind this bus um and then you now have this opportunity even though you only have a couple of steps ahead of someone else in this space where you can say great I know you've been here before me like not a big deal but like I've been working in this spot like I can actually help you in this space now and it's cool because it works

like from two angles one is that you get to help someone else or you get to demonstrate that um that mentoring that that coaching kind of thing helping someone through something and the second part is that you get to reinforce what you've been learning uh and it's a really good gauge when you're trying to teach someone else something so you've been learning about some part of the product or the service you're okay like I think I kind of know this stuff like if I go to help uh Sally on the team now I'm really bad with making up names sorry um if I go to help Sally on the team now like when I go to explain things to her if you start to feel like I don't really know what I'm talking about like maybe that's a good indicator that like you should spend

a little bit more time trying to understand these things or maybe you find that you're explaining it and Sally's really understanding it she's really getting it and you're like okay like I am starting to understand this stuff prettyy good like I can explain it it's a good gauge but leaning into these scenarios to help other people I think is huge um and I think that's a good opportunity for leadership and now that I'm turning one road away from home the last one I want to give you is that um and I do this as a manager even when I join a team so I'm a principal engineering manager uh been uh managing teams now for for 12 years a little over and uh like even when I joined my team this year I don't know if he coined it but one of my good friends

and previous colleagues has uh put me on to this phrase of ignorance as a service H and I I know it sounds funny but it's something that I like to leverage and you can absolutely do this as a junior too so you can work with people that are much more experienced in an area than you and you might say well how do I possibly help them if they know so much more by the way I don't no no no no sorry TR someone's trying to come up behind me silly silly silly you turn off the main road and speed behind me um okay let me finish this thought though um so ignorance is a service you don't not have to know more than someone else uh you don't have to have more experience than someone else but you could pair up with someone who's like

a principal on the team a senior on the team doesn't matter their level um if they're showing you stuff and guiding you through things um you could pair up and just kind of Shadow them and there's these opportunities where you could be asking them questions because they're you're curious right and there's this opportunity to sort of Challenge and and be curious and I don't mean challenge as in like like oh that's a dumb idea why would you ever do that but like hey like yeah I know that we picked this database technology like could you could you explain why we did that like could you could you walk me through why we made these decisions and having these conversations can be really beneficial um again for the same reason I mentioned earlier like maybe it's going to help reinforce understanding for other people but especially

for for more and more senior people that are looking at the technology looking at the architecture looking at the direction forward it could be this good reminder to say you know what like we did make this decision five years ago and we made it for these reasons and I wonder is that is that a good choice still today so when you provide ignorance as a service it allows other people to to question things to really kind of dig deeper and you can add a lot of value this way you can do the same thing in design discussions where someone's pitching an idea and um like in designs you want to be unbiased right you want to present information uh back it up with data that way if someone else has a different opinion or perspective if they back it up with data try to be

objective right it's not just like who proposed it but you can ask these questions and like in design discussions and being like well well why right like I know you're saying we should go uh implement it with this pattern or use this technology but like why and if you're not seeing the why it can get other people to Think Through It provide more data um maybe it causes other people to go yeah like that's a good question like why would we pick that you know we keep hearing we should use Reddit but like why why Red is because it's the only thing well no it's not the only thing what other options have you thought of right I know people jump on reddis like it's uh you know that's the only thing for cashing but like there's lots of options so it and it might

be the best in all of the cases right but the point is like if you if you're not questioning why then are you making a good informed decision so I think that as a junior you can play this role right like you can be doing this kind of thing and be trying to think more forward right you might not even realize you're doing it initially because you're just trying to practice asking why but the more practice you put into that the more you'll be thinking like like why are you even asking why right it sounds kind of meta but like you're trying to ask number one to understand but number two to get people thinking ahead so I think that there's many ways that even Juniors can uh demonstrate leadership traits it's not going to quite look the same as like um you know someone

in a management position that might be delegating work or or something else like that but um there's lots of things you can do that demonstrate leadership that you don't need a title for so I thought it was a great question uh I wrote my newsletter article about it I will be doing a live stream again um that's going to be out like the live stream will be on Monday uh November 25th so if you're watching this in the future you can go on my main Channel which is just Dev leader there'll be recorded live stream on YouTube um and other platforms I guess so you can check that out um but yeah let me know if you thought this was helpful if you have other examples of like uh things you've seen work really well have you tried them out as like demonstrating leadership traits

uh regardless of your title and level share it in the comments I think other people need to hear that there are ways to try and demonstrate this stuff without having like 10 years of experience and a a special title for it so hope that helps I'll see you next time