Nice meme from the past. Too bad nowadays corpos don't hire juniors anymore, their work is done all by AI. Or at least that's what corpos wish for.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Come work for a smaller company. We're at about 300 strong right now and we hire juniors too.
I've had a few bosses who were great at shielding the team from shit and sticking up for the department in front of everyone. I'd do absolutely anything for them and we all pitched in because it was us.
I applied for my current role partly because I knew who my boss would be and I knew he'd be great. He has my back and I have his. Same is true for the whole team.
If you're missing deadlines and getting customer complaints because of a new hire, that's a failure in management, imo.
(Of course, that's not saying management will take responsibility)
It's also due to the impossibility of estimating non-trivial tasks in engineering. You are asked to estimate the time it will take to solve problems that you have not yet discovered.
I fucking hate that.
Here is an open ended task, how much time do you think it will take?
I can't fix a manager using Jira.
It's nearly always a failure in management. In every company I've worked in, at some level failures come from bad leadership decisions.
Lack of communication, unrealistic deadlines, bad processes, no guardrails, no redundancy, poor/absent/too-harsh feedback, micromanaging, lack of observability, inaccessible resources, poor morale, etc. All management's responsibility.
heh... every management failure you mentioned was a problem at my last job. impressive.
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As you climb the layer cake, be a shit umbrella not a shit funnel.
Fuckin words of fuckin wisdom, Lahey
That is, until Sr. Dev is forced to babysit AI producing PR slop all day while Jr. Dev is looking for a new job.
Wrong
We fire the Sr Dev and get the cheaper Jr Dev to oversee the AI
Is this actually happening? I would think most tech leaders are not stupid enough to let the most capable reviewers of AI slop get fired first. I think in most case it will translate to a reduction of hiring rather than firing anyone useful to control AI output.
The Jr Dev is worse at the job than AI. We get the cheaper AI to oversee the Jr Dev
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Maybe. Maybe Sr Dev uses their connections to help Jr Dev look for a better job (assuming they like Jr Dev, maybe they look together) and one day Jr Dev helps them back. You never know.
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I was fine with mentoring junior developers until my manager decided pair programming was the way to go. I'm happy to help and teach, but like fuck am I going to sit at the same goddamn computer with some maroon all day. Can't even power-nap properly.
Full agree. Pair programming makes me unproductive and it's always just feels like one person doing it and the other person in the back saying "uh huh, yeah". Our place used it as a learning opportunity but the problem is the person I pair with haven't ever worked on my project and have no clue what's going on when I'm month deep into a feature branch.
The entire reason we developed git was so nobody would ever have to pair program again.
Does he also request you write the code on paper first?
Lol I haven't coded on paper first since I started programming ... in the '70s on my friend's Commodore-20.
Can't even power-nap properly.
Yes. Pair programming should be encouraged when appropriate, not mandated.
Naps are a part of the critical path! Lol.
pair programming can be really cool. if you have a complex problem, are roughly on the same level as the pair, are both motivated to do it.
that is a huge if. also the reason why it should never be mandated. suggested at most.
Pair programing with a mentor shouldn't be a day to day thing. Like why waste the time and put so much pressure on the trainee like that anyways?
Honestly pair programming I feel works better with more similar abilities than far off. Also give em a task to let them struggle a bit in the beginning of the sprint.
Wait till you see how beat up the Dev Manager is who is protecting the Sr Dev
Middle management is also there to communicate both ways in order to manage expectations. Especially when the senior dev is busy as well. And ideally the first few weeks to months after onboarding are there for junior devs to train and to get comfortable with the new environment (programmatically and socially). I get a lot of anti-work vibes from Lemmy communities, and while I get that capitalism is bad and big corps are optimizing profits over the employees' well being, I also think that work doesn't necessarily have to suck. I mean, it's pretty neat when someone's good at a thing and gets paid for doing something they somewhat like and are good at 70% of the time.
If times are rough and you have to take what you can get, that's obviously shit, though..
Apart from perhaps parenting, work is supposed to be the best, most fulfilling thing in life. The root crime of capitalism is alienation, the source from which every other of its more serious crimes flow.
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My internship manager was great at giving me challenges that were tough but achievable. I took their offer even though it was low for a fresh engineer because that team was so great to work with
Didn't all the junior dev roles get taken by 'agentic AI' leaving an entire generation of devs to the mercy of AI mentoring. That's going to end well.
Historically this protection was the role of a competent project manager (Yeah, they existed, rare, but gold), a senior dev wrote code, a pleasing experience that made the slog uphill (both ways) worthwhile, much like art.
If OP got it from a snr dev, kudos to them both.
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