Working With Junior Engineers

During the last four months I had the pleasure of having some new, junior programmers in my team. Working with them, I realized the enormous benefit of inner motivation. While well trained, they also posses a proactive state of mind that pushes them forward at an incredible pace. I hope that, next time I feel close to loosing my motivation I will remember the following lessons:

• Competency is not necessary related to experience (especially in IT) - there are a lot of highly trained junior engineers outhere!
  
• Constant learning and willingness to self improve is the only way to keep pace with the freshmen.
• Inner motivation is extremely important. Young people have it and its helping them achieve things that some may think only a senior can do.
• It is easier to work with junior engineers because they want to learn and to demonstrate what they are capable of (again inner motivation)
• In a team it is good to have the right balance between seniority and juniority. Senior and junior people tend to complement each other - while the first have the skills the others have the motivation. Junior engineers will inject energy and will increase the motivation of seniors. On the other hand, juniors will have some to learn from to achieve a higher skill level faster.
• Proactiveness is pushing things forward and its one of those key ingredients that we don't ever want to loose.
• Since it is not (most of the time) possible to have a team made up of only senior engineers, juniors can prove a valuable choice especially if the company is also interested in investing in people and future projects
  
• A project can fail if not enough senior resources are assigned to it - due to lack of expertise