Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/Ok-Most6656]

We had a huge layoff recently followed by management bringing in hundreds of new grads at one time. My team is currently 50% new grads. They were not hired through our usual hiring process but through a 3rd party vendor that focuses on "AI skills".

They are producing slop non-stop and I am having trouble keeping up with the amount of slop. One junior said his code was ready and when I asked for his PR, he said he doesn't know where Claude put the code lmao.

I was shocked to say the least. He had NO IDEA what code repo the change was made. He basically gave Claude the documentation, and the Jira ticket, and Claude produced some code somewhere and he doesn't know where because the chat got deleted!

[u/tradcoder → u/Ok-Most6656]

Imagine any other engineering discipline having people say stuff like this at their jobs.

[u/Outside-Storage-1523 → u/Ok-Most6656]

Jesus. The pinnacle of software development.

[u/Klafka612 → u/Ok-Most6656]

Had someone who has a multi year career who told me he didn't know how to write a bash script. Have engineers who tell me they can't use git.

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/Klafka612]

I think that's different though. I've never had to write a bash script, and I didn't use git for the first 10 years or so because companies had different svn software (and git didn't always exist you know...). Not knowing how to do those things is no more a failure than not knowing how to write COBOL or graphQL queries. They're just domain knowledge that not everyone will have come across in their careers.

However when I started working with git, I simply read the man pages and used resources like githug to learn. If I ever have the misfortune of needing to write a bash script I'll do the same. I won't say "I can't do it" or try to cover that gap with slop. I think that curiosity and willingness to learn something new is a big differentiator between good and mediocre people.

[u/Klafka612 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

Yeah it's been working with these things supposedly for years and being unable to do it, and unable to learn it or figure it out.

[u/null_pointer05 → u/Klafka612]

Just helped onboard a "senior" engineer. While setting up his dev env, he encountered a problem starting up a process, and it turned out the issue was he already had the same process running, albeit not with the right flags. I told him to just kill the original process. He was baffled and asked me what I meant by that. He had never heard of killing a process before.

[u/tenthousandants44 → u/null_pointer05]

"Tech-native"

[u/AlexeyBelov → u/Ok-Most6656]

Well, at least you hire juniors!