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.
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.
As you climb the layer cake, be a shit umbrella not a shit funnel.
Fuckin words of fuckin wisdom, Lahey
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I can’t fix a manager using Jira.
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?
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.
Devs never miss deadlines or fuck up. Never.
Most devs absolutely suck at estimating the time involved in a task. If management is setting deadlines by asking “how many hours will this task take” then missing a deadline is on management.
Devs missing deadline because they fucked around, or under estimated the work required and didn’t budget themselves enough time is more there fault (assuming the reason they under estimated wasn’t lack of information from management). Devs missing deadlines because someone tells them Tuesday that they need to drop everything and pick up a 5 pointer and have it done by Thursday, is management’s fault. The “unrealistic” part of the “unrealistic deadline” was the key word there.
Here is a real life example for you. Last year we had a few tasks for migrating our logs and dashboarding from Datadog to Dynatrace. We had just gotten our logs routing to Dynatrace on Wednesday, and were going to start work on migrating our dashboards (or actually rebuilding as there was no way to directly migrate them) the following sprint.
Then on Friday, I get an angry call from a manager of some other team that had some responsibility over the Datadogs licensing asking why we still have logs routing to Datadogs. She says that the license is being hard shut down on Monday and we need to be migrated already. So I had to drop everything. I had to export everything we had in Datadogs, and start manually rebuilding in Dynatrace (which uses a poorly documented proprietary query language I’d never used before), prioritizing the most important stuff for our support team before the weekend lest they fly blind starting Monday morning.
I only found out on Monday that this manager didnt know what they hell she was talking about, that we weren’t on the license being ended, and we had another month to do the migration. I was treated like a fucking champion by my own manager, who had been out of office on Friday, for getting done as much as I had in a single day, but there was no reason for it. She was misinformed from bad communication. And even if she had been correct, her lack of observation on the matter earlier and only informing us about the issue at the last minute was inexcusable. So was her anger over the situation at our team, who doesn’t fucking work for her, btw (not even sure which team she’s over), for not falling in line with a deadline we didn’t know about, or as it turned out a deadline we didn’t even have… bad management.
That sort of things happens a lot, but it’s also when you inform your manager. They may say to go ahead and adjust the schedule or they’re in a better position to politely tell the other manager that their failure to communicate this earlier is their problem and it’ll take as long as it takes.
Either way, you’re covered and do whichever work is appropriate.
She and my tech lead were out of office. I probably could have got in contact with them but I was new to the team, assumed the angry manager was right, that the work was urgent, and didn’t want to rock the boat. So I just did it. Today I’m far more aware of how full of shit some of the other team leaders are.
That might be the point, though.
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I’m my experience, the vast majority of people want to work. They just need their task clearly stated.
Also in my experience, people who call everyone else stupid and lazy are absolutely the problem.
If that’s the case, throwing more people, especially juniors, into the team won’t make a difference.
By the way, having a team full of people that “don’t want to work” is a sign that they lack trust in the project or leadership. Maybe management should work on that rather than spouting right wing linkedinisms. :P
Then plan for that. Your deadlines and customer expectations should reflect what you’re actually capable of delivering. If you can’t tell customers the truth, or set deadlines, or hire motivated people… then you’re not really the management.
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!
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
Wait till you see how beat up the Dev Manager is who is protecting the Sr Dev
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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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.
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
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.
There’s a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.
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.
“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.
Yeah i wish mine was like that
