A Day in the Life of a Junior Developer

9 November 2021 9:00 pm Online Web Development

Life as a Junior Developer—All You Need to Know

While you’re learning to code, it can be difficult to imagine how the job will actually be once you start. Will you still be able to keep on learning as much as you are in your coding bootcamp? How much will you be able to do your own projects initially? Will you be working with other teams? How high a salary can you expect?

Let’s address these questions as best we can, so that you can stop worrying and focus on your future career.

What can I expect as a junior web developer?

Don’t worry—as a junior developer starting out you won’t be suddenly thrust in charge of huge multi-department projects. Rather, your bread and butter will typically be monitoring—to check for errors and run bug reports in your and others’ code. If you come across bugs (and there are always bugs here and there), you’ll have to diagnose and solve them.

Of course this depends entirely on the type of company and tech team that you will be working in, as well as whether you’re working remotely on in-person, within a company or freelance. However, it’s fair to say that in general, you’ll be spending roughly the majority of your time writing code. The rest can be split between a range of tasks including working with your team, troubleshooting, and answering or explaining technical queries from other departments or stakeholders.

What makes a good junior web developer?

The answers to this question are not as limited as you think. Any career-changer worth their salt knows about the value and importance of transferable skills, and a lot more of these make our predictions for the most-wanted web developer skills at the moment.

However, quite often it’s not about what you know, but more about how you learn. As a junior developer you need to be directing your learning not just towards languages and tools, but to processes and good coding habits. Learning to think like a programmer can often make all of the difference between a junior developer and a good one.

What do junior web developers make?

Which salary you’ll earn as a web developer depends on a wide range of factors, with your seniority just one part of that. Other major factors include location and programming language. 

Taking the first of these, the country and city you’re working in is probably one of the biggest factors, as depending on where you are looking to work the junior developer salary is affected by the competitiveness of the job market and the cost of living.

Which programming language you are generally employed to work is also a critical factor in determining your pay packet. In the US, languages such as C++ and JavaScript are commanding some of the highest average salaries at the moment, with others such as HTML and Kotlin at the lower end of the scale.

According to the research from our complete web developer salary guide, the average salary for a junior developer in the U.S. is $66,738.

What do you need to become a junior developer?

It almost goes without saying that becoming a junior developer is so much more than just learning to code and then hitting the job market. Choosing a full web development career-change program will be so much more rewarding in priming you for the professional life as a programmer. 

This is due to a number of factors, chief among them the mentorship provided by seasoned professionals, who will teach you good coding habits as well as industry best practice. As well as that, the career support that these programs offer mean that not only will you be able to just land that junior developer job, but to have a well thought-out plan for your new coding career.

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