[jtonz]

A key focus that I always have when mentoring juniors is confining their work scope to something they can refer back to. It is a common mentality to simply allow them to browse around the code and perhaps solve some simple bugs. To allow them to understand the system and how it all works. My thoughts on this is that doing so is akin to giving someone new to a spoken language a novel, suggesting they peruse the book and perhaps find a typo. Understandably this can be a lot to take in.

For me I assign them a fully refined task to create something and go through the full end to end process with them. It will allow them in the future when hitting a road-block at any step of the process to go back to this code, ask themselves "what did I do here which was right" and try to apply it to their current work.