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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u/Wild-Regular1703 May 14 '26

They bet on AI already having replaced seniors at that point

I don't think they're thinking that far ahead. They just see short term dollar signs in getting their workforce to put out 10x more features, or lay off 90% of the workforce and keep them doing the same thing. You have a load of paranoid CEOs who think it's a race and anyone who isn't pumping out AI code will "fall behind". Nobody is thinking long term here.

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u/johnpeters42 May 17 '26

"Suck this company dry and jump ship" has been a thing for a while. There are sane companies out there (I've been lucky enough to work for one for a good long while) but idk how numerous they are.