From understanding to teaching: Learning curves in double pack
The first big project you work on as an inexperienced developer can quickly overwhelm you. Everyone else had a plan of the big picture and an idea of what was happening in the backend and frontend. And me? I was still struggling to understand everyone else's code and how it all worked. Fortunately, I had someone who often sat down with me, explained the code or helped me with questions.
Now, more than ten years later, I no longer feel overwhelmed by the mass of tasks and issues involved in large projects.
In my new hybrid role as a junior consultant and developer, I am now in a position to oversee the entire project, keep an eye on all areas and tickets and offer the junior developers exactly the support that I received back then.
In the beginning, I found it a little more difficult to give my colleague the right tickets. I was worried that issues that were uncomplicated or easy for me to solve might quickly overwhelm her. After all, I knew the feeling when someone gave you a ticket and said: “Then do it, you'll be finished tomorrow” - and I was in despair when it wasn't finished tomorrow. I wanted to avoid situations like that at all costs.
As it was my first project as a project manager, I naturally had a lot to learn. What often annoyed me as a developer, I now did myself. I wrote the first tickets so that I understood them and knew what they were about. But when my colleague received the ticket, she often had even more questions than before. I quickly realized how important it is to go through the tasks together, especially with junior developers, and to document every little detail for implementation. So we spent a lot of time going through the tickets together, looking at the designs and discussing the solution. Although it took more effort, it helped us both a lot. We were able to clarify any questions that arose directly and I learned to assess them better.
This sometimes led to situations in which I realized that my approach to a solution was perhaps too complicated and thought around too many corners. Sometimes it helps to take a fresh and unbiased look at complicated tasks.
In my first project, I tried to avoid mistakes that had annoyed me as a junior. I also tried to make it as easy as possible for her to get started. I'm curious to see what things I'll notice when I look back in a few years' time - and where I'll think: “Mh, it wasn't that complicated - you should have done it like that in the first place.”
