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)

As you climb the layer cake, be a shit umbrella not a shit funnel.

That is, until Sr. Dev is forced to babysit AI producing PR slop all day while Jr. Dev is looking for a new job.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.