No new blog posts to share right now. Should hopefully get one published later today, we'll see, not convinced of it yet and accidentally frittered away some of my writing time on fiddling with a preview access account to the Quickstrom.io SaaS which seems promising. Oskar Wickström, the creator of it and I have been chatting for a bit and I got the access because I helped him get started with LiveView. Now I gotta grok more PureScript.

Business is doing fine. Some proposals waiting for final go-ahead and unless they hit snags I have tons of consulting work. I still have time for some more mentees so if you are curious about mentorship don't hesitate to schedule a session.

The everyone does everything pattern

All teams I've worked on have been cross-functional with some level of separation or weight given to frontendy visual stuff and backendy tech-heavy stuff. I've worked only on smaller to medium sized teams, no big corporate orgs in my history so I have a blind spot there. While there have definitely been different responsibilities, areas of expertise and levels of seniority and expectation I have never seen very clear role definitions or clear expectations.

I think clear expectations are extremely valuable. As a novice, you often want fairly clear steps for achieving your outcome. If you know a skill well you don't necessarily need all that clarity up front. This talk by Dave Thomas gets into experience levels and skill acquisition. I found it helpful. Knowing what is expected of you helps in a related manner.

My clients generally hire me because they want an experienced person with a well-trained skill in Elixir, servers or a wider tech know-how that can deliver quality software or weigh in with considered opinions based on a number of years in the trenches. These are not fair expectations to place on a novice. So what role could a novice fill in my business as part of my team? This is a microcosm of the general software industry. No-one is looking for novices.

I think we've discarded assistant roles in too many contexts. We don't have secretaries and other practical assistants anymore, or most occupations don't, not because they stopped being useful but because they cost money and we think tech does an okay enough job. We don't build teams with space for entry-level skillsets to contribute safely and grow into more responsibility because it can be costly. And then we get this war between inflating resumes and absurdly demanding job ads, terrifying interviews and immensely under-qualified candidates.

Give people a way in that isn't the end of the world to screw up in. Or that's my thinking. And I think the shape of a team is important here. I think if everyone does everything we need everyone to have either a certain level of competence or we need to pair novices up with more experienced people continuously which is a serious time-investment to do well.

I don't think you can entirely avoid the time investment. But back to what I'm trying out. I basically can't successfully pitch junior talent to my clients. It hasn't worked. I've tried and will continue to try variants. I'm sure I'll hit occasionally but it doesn't seem reliable. What I might be able to do is bring on an Assistant Developer. I have more things I want to do and need to do than fits in my day. Client work comes first, that has to fit. Writing to y'all comes high on the list. Improving my publishing workflow, testing tutorial instructions, automating admin, documenting stuff, that often gets pushed down the list.

Some professions have assistant roles in them. Lawyers, some executives, accounting has different seniority levels at least in Sweden that perform different tasks to varying degrees. And I think a high-power independent consulting setup like mine can work that way. I don't particularly need a secretary, almost everything I do touches tech. I need someone that groks the core technical aspects and can figure out the rest. I'd like to hand off some stuff that is internal to the business and beyond that, when it makes sense, delegate parts of client work. Review my code for understandability, build out the last few tests, improve the Docker file. There are tons of constrained tasks in what I do.

So I am bringing on a part-time Assistant Developer. It is a 6 month mutual trial. She's still in dev school, we've done things together before. This should mean when she feels done with the role she has experience that should help hit that next position. It is unlikely to be in Underjord at the moment and that's understood. If we've been happy working together I'll turn my network inside out to help find that next position.

I've sketched out a role description with what my expectations are and a rough list of work I have planned as of right now. I might end up publishing some of the role description as potential inspiration to others. I love helping others learn, teaching and I absolutely work getting done without me doing it. So I look forward to seeing how this works out.

This is not entirely the first time I've done this. I took on an intern more than two years ago now I guess that I thought worked well and subsequently brought in for part time work and even occasional full time stints when I either had client needs for them or invested my income in having them build things for me. They were great, came in knowing some Python, PHP and JS from their education. Not experienced at all. Just enthusiastic and engaged. In the last few weeks they finished their final classes and landed their first full time developer job right away. An Elixir job. If I had the right kind of work for providing continuous stability I would have happily hired them.

This time around I'm trying to be more intentional with what I'm aiming for. I don't want to accidentally mislead people. I'm not building an agency, your future job isn't here. But this business sucks at entry-level so I want to attempt to provide some of that at my very minor scale. If I can give inexperienced devs a meaningful place to build skill and experience so they can find a more natural position with a team later. I want to do that.

I think many teams could benefit from breathing room and a better support structure if they could bring in assistant developers that are there to do parts of the work, complement the main body of work and in short order level up to drop the assistant prefix. Would that be helpful to your team? What is the shape of your team?

Please reply or email lars@underjord.io if you want to contribute insight or feedback. I'm also available to discuss on Twitter as @lawik. Always good to talk to y'all.

Thank you for your attention, I appreciate it.

- Lars Wikman