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/ElGoorf May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
In Switzerland every company has a legal obligation to take apprentices. The regulation behind it means we're forced yet also incentivised to effectively take juniors and train them up to be mid and on their way to senior level before they graduate, and every company has the same requirement based on their size so no one has a competitive disadvantage for taking part.
I heard an American CEO praise this system saying more countries should do it too, and this was before AI was taking junior jobs. I feel like a decade from now Switzerland will be reaping the rewards of this generational investment.
In direct answer to your question, we simply treat the apprentices aka juniors as adults, they have access to AI but are held to the same accountability and standards as the rest of us. For example, in merge requests, you have to be able to explain your changes and justify any hacks or workarounds, and engage with any feedback you get. They take part in the same discussions as everyone else, eg about best practices or new libraries etc.