Embrace Your Junior Developer Status, It’s a Shortcut to Growth
Being labelled as a junior developer often comes with a negative tone. Junior developers are frequently viewed as inexperienced, lacking in skills, requiring a lot of guidance, and making a lot of mistakes. Usually, expectations are very low for junior developers which can be quite demotivating for them.
However, these low expectations can actually also be a very big privilege. They’ll allow you to take more (calculated) risks than usual, experiment a lot and more freely, absorb more knowledge, and more easily surpass people’s expectations. If used properly, it’ll allow you to skyrocket your growth rate tremendously.
Take More Risks
One way to make use of low expectations is to take more risks than you would usually do. Others most likely won’t be expecting much from you, have in mind that you’ll mess things up, and are prepared to clean up after you. This means that in the worst-case scenario, everything will go according to those expectations.
As a developer, that bottom line is the biggest reassurance you can get. That reassurance provides you with a significant amount of freedom to face challenges head-on and take more (calculated) risks.
In the worse case, it’s a mistake. In the best case, it’s an entire growth and…