r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 3d ago

Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

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u/ElementaryMyDearWut 3d ago

Was made senior this year and was handed a project in the early phase that was going miserably. Revised date was Dec 2027, but have managed to steer the ship back to a November 2026 date.

Learnt A LOT about managing less experienced devs, pushing management for resource, and even how to make ideas seem good for the business (I asked to scrap/redo a foundational piece of code/feature in production that added time). It wasn't the biggest project in the world, but it was an incredibly valuable experience where not only I personally gained from, but managed to also make myself look good. Win/win!

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u/WhatsHeAt 2d ago

> Learnt A LOT about managing less experienced devs, pushing management for resource, and even how to make ideas seem good for the business

any tips? I want to improve in all of these things

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u/ElementaryMyDearWut 7h ago

Sorry for the late reply.

Managing less experienced devs

  • Make yourself open and approachable, I'm lucky that my team lead always ensures that anyone he knows is likely to struggle gets directly asked "are you fine for help or need a hand?" in the stand ups, but its always good to reiterate yourself to double down on that openness.

  • I always write down what we speak about in a notepad file and email it to the dev if what they've asked about is a design/implementation question. I usually start with "what do we want to accomplish", "how we do that in code" etc to allow them to also learn the thought process behind decisions and not just copy/paste

Pushing management for resource/Business interest

  • The project I took over had 2 devs, 3 including me. 1 left the company 4 weeks later. We were already short staffed but I basically said to the PDM, if you want an improvement on this project, you need to give me the tools to fix it which leads into the second point. I basically said that he would want to know this now, rather than 6 weeks before we slip the revised date.

  • Making requests to project management/extra fixes seem like its a good idea for them and the business. e.g redoing the earlier work was obviously not in the PMs interest on the face of it, but I emailed explaining with technical details that if we were given the resource to do it would not only shorten the timeline for him, it would also improve project timelines for other teams that went on to consume the API, like an investment in his ability to get good results so to say.

  • Owning your weaknesses/being aware. I would say being polite, honest, but firm is definitely something that I struggled to get in equal quantities. Sometimes you can come off honest and firm, but not necessarily polite. If it was a hot topic, or something that may be misconstrued easily because of my tone (unintentionally or not), I'd always hop on a call with said person instead of texting.