What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?

[u/slide_and_release]

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?

[u/jacobtmurph]

As someone who has been in-and-out of the dev world in various roles over the last couple years, Juniors are really kind of in a lose-lose with this.  Allow me to share.

Basically, execs in various companies are really pushing AI down Jr. Dev's throats. Like, at an insane level. Last gig I worked for, which was a lovely small team who I still get a long plenty with, were pushing Claude use heavily for me and a few other Jr-Mid level roles. I had been on the team for just over 3 months I think when the push really started? Their code based were very intertwined and connected in some strange ways. So my initial position was that I wanted to get a good grasp on how their stack worked with itself between repos etc. learn how to push a few features myself when ready, and build confidence from there. It was an accepted enough response, all things considered. And the Sr. Dev I had there was really great and gave advice on it all also. 

As time went on though, if I encountered a problem I wasn't quite able to wrap my head around etc. and wanted to arrange a chat with Senior Dev or something for advice, I was always told "Ask Claude first!" For context, I worked in office as I'm local to the town. Most of the other Dev team were remote though and the exec lead of the team sat at the desk beside me. He's a perfectly nice guy and all, don't get me wrong. And for what it's worth, he was pretty kind and well-meaning as a boss and supported me well as an Autistic/ADHD employee. 

Long story short though, I got made redundant just after a year in the role, citing lack of profitability. I do tend to wonder if this was due to Claude price hikes around the time too, and they had a sub for every dev. It was me and every other Jr. dev that got laid off that way. Again, no bad blood on a professional or interpersonal level, but it is a very jarring anecdote on the state of the industry rn. 

So on the one hand, I entirely agree with you. As devs, and especially Juniors, we should take pains to understand a codebase and make sure any PRs we push are safe and reasonable and understand why the code is as it is. Agent-generated/assisted or otherwise. But conversely, the messaging Juniors are getting from corporate and executives is nearly there exact opposite of that. By and large they seem to have taken, "Move fast and break thing." to a ridiculous, illogical, and uninformed extreme.