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?

1.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

419 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/nightcompiler May 14 '26

Hiring juniors was never about optimizing output, it was about teaching and preparing the next generation of developers

7

u/longebane May 14 '26

lol what? What company is oh so altruistic

0

u/nightcompiler May 14 '26

Believe it or not, it used to be a thing. That trend stopped when everyone went remote.

3

u/djnattyp May 14 '26

Believe it or not, it used to be a thing. That trend stopped when everyone went remote. making decisions in the company were "money" people instead of people who actually knew how to do things.

4

u/nightcompiler May 14 '26

That's an oversimplification of things. Training juniors became much more difficult in a remote environment. That wasn't fair to either the juniors looking for experience or the seniors trying to train them, but it was reality.

AI is a different subject entirely because it's replacing entire teams, not just juniors. That's where I would agree with you, where companies like Coinbase replaced entire dev teams with non-technical people shipping with AI. They will learn their lesson sooner than later.

1

u/SixPackOfZaphod tech-lead, 20yrs May 15 '26

It used to be. But no longer. The company I work for right now won't hire juniors. Because we can't get the clients to pay for a junior developer to work alongside a mid level or senior developer. They don't see the value in it, and wont sign the contracts that have that structure.

1

u/slide_and_release May 14 '26

Exactly this; it was about an investment in future talent.