How to be an amazing Junior Developer/Intern [StoryTime Saturdays]
How can you stand out during your internship or early career to get ahead.
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How can you turn your internship into a return offer?
What can you do to quickly move from a junior developer role into a more senior position?
These are questions that a lot of you have no doubt asked. Standing out in your early career stages can exponentially speed up the trajectory of your growth, both personally and professionally. Making a strong impression will ensure that you get better opportunities at work, save you from a lot of wasted hours, and be one of your strongest layers of defense against layoffs. For this article, I talked to various tech leaders and managers about the actions that help junior devs/interns stand out to them. This article will go over the recurring motifs that I saw in our conversations.
Whether you’re an intern looking to get that return offer, a junior dev looking to shoot through the career ladder, or a senior dev/manager looking to improve the productivity of your junior devs, this is not an article you want to miss.
Key Points Covered
Communicate the Why- Most juniors work on specific features/implementations. The significance of their work/challenges can be lost on more senior people, who don’t have the bandwidth to get into the details of your work. When presenting your work, always communicate why you worked on this and what your contribution will add.
Your Biggest Hurdle is your supervisor’s time-Most supervisors have a lot on their plate, not excluding the people that report to them. Thus they will not be able to give your a lot of time and energy. Accounting for this and adjusting your behavior accordingly will be a great way to show ownership and the ability to work independently.
Consistently Ping People- One great way to remain in people’s minds is to constantly share things with them. Make it a point to have a lot of sources of information, and share what you come across with your supervisors/teammates. These can be papers you read, videos you watched, interesting news you came across, or even a particularly excellent newsletter/blog post (wink wink).
Learn to say no- People will give you as much work as you will take. Especially at Junior Levels, there can be a large variance in the possible impact of the different work thrown at you. Learn to critically evaluate whether a task is worth doing, and do only the tasks that will be important. This is where understanding your end customers and viewing tech as an industry are critical.
Build a Time Machine- Your colleagues don’t live in your mind. They don’t know all the ways your current work is relevant to the orgs future goals. Create documentation of your work and how this project can be taken forward. This way, if your project gets more investment and your org decides to pursue it, you know who they will call. You also have an easy store of all your contributions you can point to.
Want more details? Let’s get right into it.
Communicate the Why
Too many inexperienced developers spend their time communicating the what of their work/progress (“I made hyperlinks more colorful”) and not the why (“Saw that people on our website weren’t able to distinguish between the links and are text, so I added color”). This is because we implicitly assume that people know what we know. We just assume that people will see things the same way we do. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Keep in mind everyone you’re working with is also facing their own unique challenges and circumstances. They will put the minimum possible amount of energy into what you’re doing, just because they have to conserve their attention for their own work. How many times have you zoned out during meetings when someone else is presenting their work? This is doubly true for more senior people, who often tend to ignore the presentations by their juniors b/c most of that work is too low-level/focused. Chances are, your supervisor doesn’t really care that you tried an ARIMA instead of an LSTM for your time series forecasting task.
I have 6 interns reporting to me, and I couldn’t give you details on what they do.
-Data Manager, Consulting Company
This is a problem if you care about good performance reviews. These are the people who will give you your offer/promotion. So what do you do instead? If you got great acting skills, buy a fake mustache. Then french revolution your managers, take their spot and pretend to be them for the rest of your life (this will work regardless of whether your manager has a mustache or not. Fake mustaches have magic in them). But what about those who skipped out on acting class? Don’t worry, I have something for you as well.
For every action you take, justify how that action is expected to impact the business case. Instead of just saying you added regularization to the model, talk about how the current data models were not generalizing well to new clients, increasing operational overhead (basic business bro jargon is a game changer. Show up to Finance Fridays to speak Finance Bro). Speaking in terms of business impact is going to make everyone’s ears perk up. It can also lead to you getting better input since people can throw in their own 2 cents. This step is relatively simple to implement and will lead to amazing outcomes. Try it and thank me later. I did a more in-depth post on how to crush daily standups here, so check it out if you’re interested.
Now moving on to a mindset shift you have to make.
Your Biggest Hurdle is your supervisor’s time
Your supervisor is probably really busy. Thus they really value people who can work independently and will take initiative on projects. Start doing this. A lot of interns/juniors make the mistake of waiting for approval for every task they embark on. If you think something is worth doing, just do it. Start working on the improvement you think is worthwhile. If your manager/colleagues don’t like it, they will let you know in the meeting/async channels. I’m not asking you to ignore the procedures for shipping to production and just push whatever features you want out there. However, too many juniors keep waiting around for their supervisors to assign work to them. Flip this approach on its head. Do what you want, as long as other people aren’t telling you to stop. Even if you make a mistake, a good supervisor will appreciate your initiative.
The only caveat (as I’ve said before) is to make sure you’re always communicating your work. This gives people opportunities to chip in and offer course correction before you do something catastrophic. And obviously, don’t push your work into production without the appropriate checks.
It was a pleasure working with Devansh. He repeatedly demonstrated that he can take challenging data science tasks, apply research, and implement sound but novel enhancements resulting effective solutions. Combined with outstanding communication skills and minimal need for supervision he became a great part of the team.
- Notice how my manager recommendation stresses my independence and communication. This recommendation is on my LinkedIn profile.
Don’t overlook the power of constant communication. Remember people will never know the true amount of work you put into something. The problem with abstract fields like software is that work and productivity are very hard to define. Constantly sharing updates, interesting information you came across, and thoughts on your work will help you gain more attention and stand out in a positive way.
Before moving on to the next section, let me quickly summarize some of the major benefits of constantly communicating-
Helps people remember who you are and what you’re working on.
By constantly sharing updates, your colleagues are more likely to see you as someone with information. You can become their go-to. Top-of-the-mind recall is a powerful thing.
If you share your thoughts/rationale, and people don’t push back, then the responsibility is distributed. Thus, if something goes wrong, it won’t solely be your fault.
You contribute to the knowledge of the team.
Makes it possible to receive better feedback, improving the quality of your work.
Brings people along for the work. If you’re constantly sharing papers/writeups, then it’s very hard for people to claim that you’re not doing much.
There are many others (such as communication improving the clarity of your thought). I’ll do a dedicated piece on communication soon. For now let’s move on the most challenging, but important component.
Say No To Work
In my post about how to easily integrate self-study into your life, I talked about the importance of picking your battles and not wasting your energy. The same principle applies here. There will always be unrealistic expectations that others place on you wrt what they expect. Your manager will give you large unrealistic projects. There will always be more bugs to fix, code to optimize, and features to implement. It’s not your job to do all of it.
Instead, you need to be discerning. When given a task, evaluate whether it is feasible and worthwhile. Is there a more pressing task you can do? Can the same outcomes be achieved with a simpler method? Are the timelines realistic? Remember, your supervisor doesn’t have their boots on the ground, you do. So if you believe that something is not the right call, let them know. Most good supervisors will be happy to listen to you and either provide you with guidance on how to accomplish tasks or revise their expectations. Either is a win. Provided that you are able to communicate properly, there is nothing wrong with providing alternative ideas. The following format works well if you want to refuse the work given to you-
Point out what goal the proposed task is supposed to accomplish. This shows that you understand the proposed task.
Talk about why you think the task might not be best (technical challenges/scale/time etc).
Present your alternative.
If your alternative solves a different problem, then talk about why solving that problem makes more sense given current circumstances.
This format allows for open and constructive discussion. Steal it. If you have any proposed changes, let me know in the comments/by replying to this email/messaging me through my links.
This can be incredibly scary at first, but it is worthwhile. Learning to effectively set your boundaries and negotiate your work is crucial for not getting burned out later in life.
Now for the final adjustment, you should make to stand out. This will be easy, provided that you do everything else.
Pull Out the Crystal Ball
As you’re working on a task, maintain detailed documentation on what you’ve done, how your contributions helped larger KPIs, and how your work can be extended into the future. This can include not just your successes, but also your failures (tried model but it didn’t work). Anyone looking through it should have a very concise idea of what you did and what it accomplished.
This is one of the highest ROI moves to help you get ahead in your career. Whether it’s for performance reviews or the end of your internship period, presenting this to your manager is a way to boost your chances of earning your goals. If one of the things you work on ends up becoming a more important project, then your documentation would be important for version 0 of the project. It will also be a great reference manual if you’re preparing for interviews. Going over what you did and the challenges etc will make for great talking points (just be sure not give away company IP).
If you’re looking for guides on how to create good documentation, refer to the post below.
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Stay Woke,
Go kill all,
Devansh <3
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