Improve your dev staff by pairing seniors with juniors.

In the start of this year I was about to embark on a medical treatment plan that would make it very hard for me to predict what days I’d be able to fully engage my work tasks. So I made a plan with my dev lead to not put me on anything with time sensitivity (spoiler this may not have happened), and instead to be a mentor to the junior members on their features. This turned out to be a great experience for me, as well as an improvement to the team’s growth and abilities.

While I was not at 100% productivity I paired up with a more junior dev to work on a senior level feature, but made sure I was not to be the lead of the project, thus not responsible for the day-to-day and free to be OOF any time I needed. This turned out to be great for both me and my co-worker. We were able to navigate issues with PMs, advocate in security reviews and other compliance tasks, as well as deliver a feature that we both were proud to ship.

I did this with two separate projects and developers that delivered features by the completion of the summer, both of the junior developers did a great job as lead, and one of them even received a promotion to senior at the end of that summer as well!

I now believe that this is a reliable strategy for teams with at least 50% junior mix. Pair the few seniors up with multiple juniors and this could be a force multiplier for the team, essentially allowing seniors the freedom to bounce between features as the work requires, while simultaneously empowering the juniors to stretch up to the senior band as the leads of features. This gives them experience in managing their features tasks, advocating in front of stakeholders like PMs and Leadership team. Also gets them out into compliance reviews where they will start to think of these requirements at the start of a project, rather than being forced to ‘backfill’ changes to bring the feature into line.

Try this out on your team and see if you can be the force multiplier!