Career success depends on working well with others and understanding company needs, not just on technical proficiency in writing code.
The majority of a developer's career is spent extending, maintaining, and cleaning up existing codebases, not building new projects from scratch.
The 'move fast and break things' mindset leads to burnout and unsustainable development cycles, prioritizing shipping over people and product quality.
Getting started in a new role involves setting up environments, understanding company policies, and learning the existing product and team dynamics.
A developer's daily work primarily consists of fixing bugs, contributing to existing code, writing tests, and participating in pull requests.
A developer's skills evolve from using code without full understanding to writing, reviewing, and eventually defining code standards and company direction.
Companies now prefer intermediate developers due to the rise of frameworks, AI tools, the myth of the '10x developer', and issues with job hopping.
AI-generated code often prioritizes popular but potentially flawed solutions, leading to security vulnerabilities and eroding fundamental programming skills.
Investing in junior developers builds loyalty and creates a sustainable, knowledgeable team that saves money on talent acquisition and product rewrites long-term.
Promotions are often based on non-technical contributions like improving processes, sharing knowledge, automating tedious tasks, and bringing in new talent.
To secure a job, junior developers should understand company needs, build solid foundational knowledge, contribute to open source, and be adaptable.
27:13
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58:06Anna Fritsch-Weninger
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47:35Laurie Voss, Rey Bango, Hannah Foxwell, Rizel Scarlett & Thomas Steiner
35:01Angie Jones, Kent C Dobbs, Liran Tal & Chris Heilmann
44:20Cassidy Williams
59:27Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney & Julia Kordick
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
JO Media Software Solutions GmBh
Brunn am Gebirge, Austria
autoiXpert GmbH & Co. KG
Stuttgart, Germany
brandung GmbH & Co. KG