<story><title>Ask HN: Suggestions for working effectively with junior devs?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a senior dev at one of the FAANGs with more than 15 years of experience, but the rest of my team consists of devs with an average of 2 years of experience. At first when I joined, I thought this was an aberration, but there are many teams around me that are structured similarly. Is this how FAANGs try to scale teams? The devs on my team are smart but mostly naive about getting stuff done in the real world. I&amp;#x27;m sure they&amp;#x27;ll figure it out over time. But in the meantime, my days are quite frustrating because I&amp;#x27;m in teaching mode most of the time instead of building stuff.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>I never worked at a FAANG.  Do these teams not have managers?  Most of those responsibilities seem like the job of a manager.  In my career, this approach of one senior person on a team of juniors means the senior is responsible for a lot of the system design and other high level technical decisions, but they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be counted on for things like motivating other employees.</text></item><item><author>turdprincess</author><text>Unfortunately you will either need to change your attitude or change teams.  In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others and acting as a force multiplier of their work.  So doing stuff like:&lt;p&gt;* figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done&lt;p&gt;* giving them work which stretches their abilities but doesn&amp;#x27;t overwhelm them&lt;p&gt;* giving them some space to fail but not too much&lt;p&gt;* grooming your juniors to be leaders themselves so they can do some of this mentorship&lt;p&gt;And in general, there are two ways to go.  The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work.  And basically accept that the prime &amp;quot;getting shit done&amp;quot; years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now.&lt;p&gt;The second is to change jobs where you are back in the driver seat.  As a senior engineer, these positions DO exist even at FAANG (over on my team, I am the most junior with 12 years of experience).  However, the more senior you get, the harder it is to find a role like this, especially in big tech - its the rare exception.  Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on keyboard, but at the price of a paycut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>turdprincess</author><text>I think in the end, it&amp;#x27;s hard to separate technical leadership from human leadership.  After you do your system design, you need to divy it up amongst the juniors to get it implemented.  When deciding who gets what piece you have to consider what motivates them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, etc... But for sure your manager is helpful in figuring these things out.&lt;p&gt;At this level, your manager basically becomes your partner, with the same goal of getting the work done most effectively.  Your domain is the technical, their&amp;#x27;s is the human, but there is ton of overlap in the middle</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Suggestions for working effectively with junior devs?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a senior dev at one of the FAANGs with more than 15 years of experience, but the rest of my team consists of devs with an average of 2 years of experience. At first when I joined, I thought this was an aberration, but there are many teams around me that are structured similarly. Is this how FAANGs try to scale teams? The devs on my team are smart but mostly naive about getting stuff done in the real world. I&amp;#x27;m sure they&amp;#x27;ll figure it out over time. But in the meantime, my days are quite frustrating because I&amp;#x27;m in teaching mode most of the time instead of building stuff.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>I never worked at a FAANG.  Do these teams not have managers?  Most of those responsibilities seem like the job of a manager.  In my career, this approach of one senior person on a team of juniors means the senior is responsible for a lot of the system design and other high level technical decisions, but they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be counted on for things like motivating other employees.</text></item><item><author>turdprincess</author><text>Unfortunately you will either need to change your attitude or change teams.  In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others and acting as a force multiplier of their work.  So doing stuff like:&lt;p&gt;* figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done&lt;p&gt;* giving them work which stretches their abilities but doesn&amp;#x27;t overwhelm them&lt;p&gt;* giving them some space to fail but not too much&lt;p&gt;* grooming your juniors to be leaders themselves so they can do some of this mentorship&lt;p&gt;And in general, there are two ways to go.  The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work.  And basically accept that the prime &amp;quot;getting shit done&amp;quot; years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now.&lt;p&gt;The second is to change jobs where you are back in the driver seat.  As a senior engineer, these positions DO exist even at FAANG (over on my team, I am the most junior with 12 years of experience).  However, the more senior you get, the harder it is to find a role like this, especially in big tech - its the rare exception.  Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on keyboard, but at the price of a paycut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>britch</author><text>On my team at least there&amp;#x27;s a grey area between managers responsibilities and Tech lead responsibilities.&lt;p&gt;Managers are ultimately responsible for getting tasks that stretch employees abilities, but also in my experience don&amp;#x27;t have hands on the code. They&amp;#x27;re usually dealing with politics around team priorities, goals, keeping people motivated, etc.&lt;p&gt;Managers rely on tech leads to identify work that needs to get done and would be a good fit for the newbie. Tech leads also have to teach newbies best practices, offer advice on designs, etc.&lt;p&gt;Managers are often technical (e.g. used to be programming daily), but are not actively writing code anymore.&lt;p&gt;I feel this is a bad situation for tech leads since they have to sort of manage, and do design work, and write code. Kind of a thankless job</text></comment>