2025-09-21 –, Space 2
What happens when a junior picks up a task involving unfamiliar tools and concepts? This talk follows a beginner's journey across three weeks of debugging, learning, and asking for help. There’ll be advice for juniors on navigating challenging work, and advice for seniors on how to help.
This talk shares my experience in my first ever role as a junior engineer after switching careers. I picked up a ticket involving tools I’d never used before (OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb), hoping to spend a day learning a bit about how we implement observability and monitoring of our Django app. Spoiler alert: it took three weeks of learning, debugging and asking for help to complete the work.
I learned some valuable lessons along the way, not only technical, but about how to problem-solve, collaborate effectively, and keep going in the face of seemingly unending challenges.
Through this talk, I want juniors in the audience to know:
- You can do difficult things, even if you think you lack the experience or knowledge required. If you’re willing to learn, and have a supportive team around you, you have everything you need.
- Doing difficult things is daunting, but also incredibly rewarding. You often learn 10x more than you expected, and when you finally finish the work, it feels like winning the lottery.
- Taking on hard things benefits the whole team—others might learn something new, or strengthen their own understanding by helping you out.
- There’s a lot you can do to support yourself: reach out early, reach out often, and learn how to communicate problems clearly.
- The value of your work cannot be measured by lines of code—it’s far, far greater than that.
This talk also offers a reminder to seniors, and leaders or managers, about how tough it can be to be new. Juniors don’t just lack experience—our stack of 'unknown unknowns' is large and easily underestimated. When things break or go wrong, we might not understand where or why, and even if we find the bug or error, knowing how to fix it is another challenge altogether. I’ll share how my team’s support made all the difference—and offer practical ideas for how others can support their junior colleagues, too.
This won’t be a super technical talk. It’s more about the human experience of being a beginner, the value of persistence, why asking for help is a great thing to do, and the power of supportive teams. Whether someone is a junior, a senior, in a leadership position, or somewhere in between, regardless of discipline there will hopefully be something valuable in this talk for everyone.
Basic
Katie is a Junior Software Engineer at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford and a member of the PyCon UK organising committee.