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 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.
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?
That might be the point, though.
As you climb the layer cake, be a shit umbrella not a shit funnel.
Fuckin words of fuckin wisdom, Lahey
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.
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.
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. ๐.๐.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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