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
Right. Sad but true.
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 skilled enough to correct AI output.
The Jr Dev is worse at the job than AI. We get the cheaper AI to oversee the Jr Dev
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.
But according to LinkedIn we’re all too crazy about AI to care about Jr Dev if we can have fun with AI. We’re all having a ton of fun using AI, right?
yes. tons. of. fon. 👏.👏.
What would be your favorite most fun part about AI? Mine is constant sorrow, face palming and existential crisis ever since management heard of it.
mine is the bucket of thumbs i gotta carry around if i wanna not look suspicious on camera
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LinkedIn socialists unite!
edit I’m just being cheeky and sarcastic. Work should be fulfilling. I suspect it’s easier when one deals with the tangible stuff like construction
I think it’s the fact that you’re not in control that is the main issue. You’re working to fulfill someone else’s vision for their benefit, not yours.
But yeah, the sitting still all day is another layer of unfulfilling.
Yes, that’s a component for sure (although I’ve not really done private gigs before - most of my assignments have been government. In NZ it’s still fairly small).
I do love a tight and small team that sticks together though, that can be really rewarding!
That is the most privileged thing I have read in a long time.
Did you read Marx, or is it only privileged people who can read and/or have time for that in your mind?
Wait till you see how beat up the Dev Manager is who is protecting the Sr Dev
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
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.
Come work for a smaller company. We’re at about 300 strong right now and we hire juniors too.
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.
I’m doing tech support and customer support. The dev team missed their deadline on the launch of the new ERP and launched it anyway a few days later. There are still Lorem Ipsum in some places. We can’t even edit client’s names or phone numbers yet. We also can’t open new accounts for a handful of clients.
I usually can cover for “my” team. We all make mistakes and sometimes things are not going according to plan. But so far it’s the worst deployment I have ever seen. I gave up on trying to help clients and I’m now just telling them I can’t do anything, while the dev team is telling me they are working on those issues and they should be fixed “in the following days, bro”. It’s been two weeks of “this is gonna get fixed soon” while I am bullshitting the clients telling them “oh I’ve been told it would work now, please try again”.
I’m tired and they should be better. I just script for fun. I was doing PHP 20 years ago and still host a few services for a handful of people, and sometimes I think I might do a better job than some junior programmers.
Wait? They didn’t test it and didn’t delay when they knew it wasn’t feature complete? The failure wasn’t with junior devs.
Well, that wasn’t my experience when I was a junior, every failure was blamed on me, PR is deliberatelty stretched to look like I am slower and worse than I am, it was a lot of suffering but we all have to start from somewhere.
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.
Pretty much. We had the worst junior dev ever and he never got better for a period of two years because he was coddled and allowed to keep submitting horrible code. He was laid off, thankfully honestly, but if there weren’t budget cuts I feel like he never would’ve improved and just kept wasting everyone else’s time.
Edit: the point I was making here is that coddling him kept from either being fired or getting better. Not sure why people cannot understand that more than one thing can be true. In this case that the dude is a horrible dev and also that management dropped the ball. I tried to teach him shit. When he didn’t improve I let my manager know how things were going. Nothing happened to him for literal years.
And as the cherry on top here he said he was going to start some kind of businessy-sounding machine learning degree program, after he was let go in layoffs. So yeah the dude knows he sucks at coding but definitely wants in on the AI grift.
So why didn’t y’all train him if he was that bad?
This assumes that Jr Dev wanted to be trained, and could be trained. I’ve known some AI-brain “devs” from before AI was a thing.
If someone can’t be bothered to read an error message, can we really be expected to teach them how to debug? Etc.
Yeah. Several of us tried to train him. He was not only not as good as he seemed in the interview, he didn’t care to learn.
Oh a “what the hell’s an error message” Dev. I thought they all died out
There’s a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.
Ha no. There are a ton of new juniors like that.
I grew up during the great Sierra adventure game age so if you didn’t know how to program a boot disk you weren’t turning on your computer properly. With style.
“Someone represented themselves as being very interested in development and getting better at it. It’s obviously not their fault if all that was bullshit!”
It is a long story but yeah it was about 80% management’s fault and 20% the fault of the dude having zero ambition. I didn’t expect this comment to get so many downvotes… it’s as though I would need to explain that I’m not entirely blaming him for continuing to be employed in a problematic manner as he was. Obviously management should have addressed the issue and didn’t, but why am I not allowed to blame a person for sucking at their job… ? If the idea is that if I thought he sucked I should have fixed it, that’s silly, but regardless I did try to teach him things. He never retained anything, so after a few months I gave up.
You’re totally allowed to blame him. He had a choice and he decided not to do what it takes.
I’m not even sure why you’d allocate only 20% to the dude.
Thanks for actually reading what I wrote. Many people read a little and make up the rest or make up something to replace what was written. I mean yeah, he deserves way more than 20% of the blame for pretending like he wanted to learn, however my manager bears a lot of blame for the situation overall because he should have reprimanded him then fired him after a couple months if he didn’t improve. Instead, my teammates and I spent hours and hours ripping this guy’s PRs to shreds and trying to teach him shit and it never went anywhere. I remember one PR had over 90 comments on it! He routinely broke the build, usually in the same ways as before. I spent so much time pointing out the same mistakes over and over.
If he’d been fired, that timesuck would’ve been minimized and actually there’s some small possibility he would’ve gotten better if he thought he couldn’t get away with coasting like he did. But since his incompetence went uncontested for two years by management, he wasted tons of everyone’s time. If it were up to me he would’ve been gone before three months.
Corporation is parasitic. Why did you sustain the existence of Mani Mani’s vampiric thieves of your entire existence, by your own choice?
That guy wasn’t making mistakes when poisoning the blood drawn.
Sometimes it just doesn’t pan out.
Had a junior dev that basically decided he would rather try to grift through instead of doing the job. Never seen someone work so hard at trying not to work at all. Every day it was a different excuse, a different other person to point to as to why he didn’t even try to do anything that day. I think at least 7 or 8 of his grandmothers died during his tenure. And management ate it up.
Until one day he lost track of things and blamed the manager asking him why things weren’t done. Said the manager never sent him some material and of course the manager had. Suddenly the manager believed the rest of us who had been saying he was lying for the last many months…
The key was he was cheap and was in theory supposed to be as good as a higher paid alternative, so management would have to admit to being wrong to ditch him…
I’ve had a similar case in my department, and the guy couldn’t even be let go because he’s family of some important man in the company.
Yeah i wish mine was like that
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