[ravishi]

I had the opposite experience with junior devs on my team. The ones that knew how to communicate and ask for help thrived. It was easy to negotiate some head banging on the wall time while also pairing from time to time to discuss where they're going. I've seem them flourish in less than a year's time and be able to perform just like experienced devs.

[bluefirebrand]

All of the junior devs Ive ever mentored, I would be as detailed as possible with my onboarding, demo the product from end to end, walk them through the codebase, and provide step by step instructions to start up their own dev environment. This usually took a couple of days, depending on the project and the dev.

Then I give them a ticket and say "if you get stuck, let me know"

For the first little while, I am super responsive with them and answer everything immediately and eagerly.

After a while, I start to wait about 5-10 minutes before I respond to questions. Usually they figure out the answers before I even get back to them in these cases, and then I get to praise them for it.

[ravishi]

That's a great technique I would say!

I stumbled on it by chance when I failed to make it to a client meeting with one junior dev I was leading. He was counting on my presence to support him, we had already discussed it before. But I got caught up last minute and he decided to go alone. And I know it was hard for him, but everything went fine. And from then on he was a lot more confident in his day to day.