How do you guys deal with juniors?

I’m currently going through the experience of having a junior coworker, and it’s been something completely new for me. In my previous jobs, I’ve always worked with colleagues who were at the same level or more experienced than me, so I’m not used to reviewing code or guiding someone on how things should be done.

To make it trickier, this guy tends to “vibecode” a lot, to the point that he can’t even explain what the code his Copilot spits out is doing.

I don’t really blame him though. Most of the mistakes he makes are things I’ve done myself at some point (like overcomplicating simple tasks). But now he keeps coming to me as if I’m his mentor, and honestly, I have no idea what to do with this guy lol.

Give him a lollipop :) Think about it :)

The way our Senior devs dealt with juniors was to give them exact expectations and specifications so there is no gray zone (because in that case they'll come bother you more).

As a Junior myself in some areas, the key thing to stick to when evolving is to try and figure things out myself and have solid communication with the team so that no one gets pissed off at each other. In this communication it should be specified not to complicate things and to keep it simple. Ad-hoc meetings are encouraged because a lot of the time a Junior sits there with a lack of confidence and is afraid of asking, slowing down progress. And set expectations; what is ok, what is not ok. How and when you may be bothered, when not.

Additionally, you could ask them to not vibe code (my Senior asked this) and to only work out solutions using Google and no A.I. whatsoever. This way should teach a Junior the trenches.

Communication, communication.

the AI makes things unnecessarily complicated btw

@jestdotty It really does. LLMs already spit out a lot of junior level shit like useless comments everywhere.

The junior really need to be taught to NEVER accept the auto-generated answer. Find all the problems and fix them .. never accept something you don't fully understand. If you don't understand it and it doesn't work, you probably need to rewrite it.

Right now I was doing a side project involving some audio socket tunnels.

Every junior said it couldn't be done because it had too much latency.

Enter setsockopt (and having to do it in C or python) to save the day.

No vibe programmer will ever learn that shit if left to their own devices.

@kinu if he's assigned to you, you are his mentor ;P

For me, we worked together on a project and in general, we got along, he was very resistant to pick up good practices, though. But throwing him in the deep end, and asking him to explain how he did things, did help. Also gave him so more advanced techniques to use, which would sometimes make him feel bad when you collapse a 30+ line function into a single line, though it helped explained its just experience.

At the end though, his approach to programming is more financially oriented than passion IMO which made him dismiss some learning areas

> 'To make it trickier, this guy tends to “vibecode” a lot, to the point that he can’t even explain what the code his Copilot spits out is doing.'

The way to properly deal w/ a junior that does that is to find a shed && take that junior behind it. One needs a belt for the activity, too.

/jk

On a serious note, wanting to use code that's been spit up by an LLM && you have no idea of how it works... that junior needs to unlearn that type of thinking very quickly.

@D-4got10-01

You should’ve seen my face when I asked him to point out where a method he was calling was, just for him to open up Copilot to ask it instead (with the AI almost taking a full minute to find it).

@kinu Wow... That's just a disaster waiting to happen. The Overreliance on LLMs.

@BordedDev

Well, not really. He was supposed to help me, and he’s expected to be just as effective as I am, maybe even more (I guess bro sold himself really well). My boss doesn’t even realize that this guy is actually slowing down our development, and I have no idea how to bring it up without sounding like I’m trying to sweep the rug from under him.