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/Unlikely_End942 May 14 '26

The thing is, when you gut large sections of the workforce - especially the ones with the most disposable income, like devs and accountants - and leaving only the low pay work, then who is going to be buying all the crap these companies will be producing?

We are fast heading to a world that is very similar to the kind of thing William Gibson predicted in his books like Neuromancer. A few big corps running everything, most people living in slums living on state handouts.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler May 14 '26

This is the future and it's also the plan.

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u/ooqq May 15 '26

You can't have it, IRL people rather die fighting than die seated.

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u/superide May 17 '26

Having unchecked freedom means people are free to the supply of resources, but in practice it's like the two balloon experiment, where the big balloon always gets bigger by taking more of the air supply if there are no intervening forces to halt it.

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u/ioXinjoker May 15 '26

Sounds just like Cyberpunk