Once I had a junior who was the child of the boss, whom would refuse to listen because they thought they knew better. That junior was ambitious and always wanted harder tasks even though at the end of the day, someone would need to “pair” with them (aka go and do the task for them).

I left that place. Now I have a junior who knows so little that if they came and told me they don’t know how to turn on a computer, I wouldn’t be surprised (yes, unfortunately the bar went down incredibly fast).

I feel sorry for the new junior. I don’t have bandwidth for all of this. Nobody in the team has.

I do think it sucks that companies in general are so against juniors, but I wish at least that the ones who still make the cut were a little bit more prepared.

@jestdotty there’s no task I can give to this person that I won’t be disturbed up to the point of losing focus. Asked them to fix some warnings, by type casting some variables. Simple enough, right?

I got at least 8 messages about it, besides a 30 minutes meeting. I had hopes they would be able to figure out things once I gave very specific directions, then junior decided to do yolo and say that they didn’t understand as they insisted on the wrong approach. 🫠

@idkhow you mean….you literally gave a demonstration of what needs to be done and he still struggled? Damn. That’s sad

I still have no idea how people who can’t do basic shit get in, I bet he can’t figure out how to create a basic class or a simple loop.

Everyone was a juniour at some point. Speaks more about your level than theirs. If you can't help and mentor them you're not ready to be seniour engineer.

@kanyewest nah, I’ll gladly take my fault whenever it is due. But this one isn’t. Manager themselves were clear since the beginning that this person didn’t have background in programming, nor in the fundamentals.

If you say to person what they need to achieve, by doing the following step by step, where each step has examples how to do, and what they should see as a result on each step.

I’d gladly take fault if the person replied to me that none of it made sense or by asking questions. Person doesn’t do so, and instead says that they understood everything and that what I said made perfect sense.

Then person proceeds to avoid asking questions and to show anything in a way that allows me to properly give feedback. By the time person claim that the task is done, all the steps were ignored, without any reasoning why, when in fact, before writing all that material, I did test everything and made sure that it was correct and that it solves the problem.

+

@kanyewest

I also wouldn’t have any problems to accept other solutions if the person came to me and said, “I tried to come up with another solution, and tried this, that does meet all the requirements of the ticket and the goal you’ve explained”.

But this also doesn’t happen. I tried to give contained tasks where person would have an opportunity to ask questions and experiment, but no avail. No questions, nothing.