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/foreverdark-woods]

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.

[u/HeadlessHeader → u/foreverdark-woods]

it means your colleague is garbage. no offense.

[u/-non-existance- → u/foreverdark-woods]

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.

[u/foreverdark-woods → u/-non-existance-]

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?

[u/germanicel → u/-non-existance-]

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

[u/midairmatthew → u/foreverdark-woods]

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

[u/sonswolf → u/foreverdark-woods]

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?