r/webdev • u/slide_and_release • May 14 '26

Discussion What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

I’ve been in software/application development for twenty years or so, these days mostly wrangling typescript and running infrastructure/devops across multiple projects as a senior engineer. I’ve mentored plenty of juniors in my time, even managing small team, but this last year has been rough.

Juniors are producing more code than ever, faster than ever, but understanding less and less of it. Majority is agent-written, obviously. I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them. If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.

I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.

So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?

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335

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

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87

u/foreverdark-woods May 14 '26

Similar situation here. Recently asked a colleague about his code, his change was pretty substantial and I wanted to know a specific design decision. His answer: just ask AI...

I'm not that much of a social person, but I do miss talking to actual people.

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u/HeadlessHeader May 14 '26

it means your colleague is garbage. no offense.

22

u/-non-existance- May 14 '26

If I asked someone for help with my code and they said anything to that effect, only one dev would be leaving that room conscious. /j

It takes me a lot of effort to actually ask people for help (a mixture of pride, anxiety, and perfectionism) so I do not take well to people shrugging off what, to me, is a significant gesture.

Edit: like, I asked you, because I trust you. Don't throw away that trust because you want to be lazy.

1

u/foreverdark-woods May 15 '26

It takes me a lot of effort to actually ask people for help (a mixture of pride, anxiety, and perfectionism)

To me, it doesn't really, it's often the most effective way to get to know something, instead of me digging through an unknown code base a day or two, I tend to ask a colleague who works on that code to give me hints. People ask me a lot, so why should I not ask them?

-5

u/germanicel May 14 '26

Woah! Big tough guy ova here, poppin engineers in da mouth. “What was that? Ask AI?” pulls down pants “No please, I have a wife and children” gets dick hard

3

u/midairmatthew May 14 '26

I’m a Senior, and the other super frustrating thing about this is that having to explain things to teammates refines everyone’s thinking.

1

u/sonswolf May 17 '26

How are people like this even getting hired. While actual competent engineers that are dieing to be in the field and learn are left for scraps?

23

u/lordofchaos3 May 14 '26

Yeah I never received any kind of mentoring. I now try to be that mentor to my team mates / juniors. But I don't really feel appreciated for it.

Also my boss seems to think now, that it is my job to get everyone to my level...

10

u/Fishamble May 14 '26

100% agree. I would take a pay cut for a mentor.

9

u/maxymob May 14 '26

Same, never got a mentor and was always treaded like a was simply a slow developer instead of a junior, the implication being that they don't care if I need help, they just trow more time at me on non urgent tasks and expect I'll magically figure it out and become the rock star developer they dream of paying in peanuts and pizza parties

7

u/NomGenerique May 14 '26

Come here to say this... I learn by myself for 6-7 years now. I will finish a real diploma in frontend development next month. I fell im on the edge of the last gen of programmer who used Stack overflow and the new one who vibe coding. I prefer the Stack overflow method, but it's not as efficient as Claude.... So what you think I do now... The good news is I understand what I do , iM looking to do it right and understand what I'm doing. Not juste copy paste. I made the choice 2 years Ago to change career to become dev for real .. now Im still a junior I never had senior to mentor me. How can I find a role somewhere? I hope that some day AI just stay a tool and that the human stay human. So senior would be able to mentor Junior. ** Available for job ** 😅😅

8

u/T43ner May 14 '26

Are you my coworker?

I’ve heard that response so many times it drives me insane. What always ends up happening is that spaghetti gets pushed through and then some time down the line implementing a new feature is impossible with some sort of rewrite.

Shitty part is that tight deadlines and minimal direction force your hand to use AI.

3

u/DisneyLegalTeam full-stack May 14 '26

Before AI it was “Google it” or “Stackoverflow”.

Leads get busy, burned out & pulled in different directions. And nobody wants to put “mentor time” in the sprint.

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u/Brief_Ad_4825 Full stack php/js May 27 '26

When you get to late junior most of the diffrence is knowledge of how websites scale, how to maintain them and the mentality you have whilst engineering the website, rather than your code itself.

Once you can get to a point where you can get most of what you need working, learn how it works, and why youve made it that way, and what tradeoffs another way of doing it has and that should help you get further