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I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

Comments
  • 10
    Juniors are the wrong people to teach you about best practices.

    They can only regurgitate what they've been taught. They don't have the breadth of experience to understand the patterns they are following and to know when to break them.
  • 1
    @panta82 yes it's difficult to produce that mind shift from "follow the rules" to "you are making the rules and are responsible for that"
  • 1
    Im feeling u a lot on that I have been on that situation too !! I know how much stress and bad feelings this causes, teaching new developers that are just fakers its damn hard :(

    Not every junior developer is hardcore learner, some of them just try to find excuses about everything and actually not doing something right.

    If u want help ping me maybe I can help u something on that !!
  • 2
    Hate to say it, but you were perhaps a bit naive here. You hired two fresh grads, and they were highly opinionated and wrote crappy code to boot - that's pretty much the fresh grad stereotype!

    Personally I would have used the same money to hire just one person with at least a few year's experience in a commercial environment.
  • 2
    @AlmondSauce yep. my first time hiring somebody. learned from that
  • 0
    You're Indonesian right?
  • 1
    If the client is happy, and the app is stable; then the code is good.
  • 0
    @kambing curious to know why you think that
  • 0
    Can you share some info like what the website is about and source of revenue and tech stack you use? if you feel comfortable.
  • 0
    @deviloper you sounds like people from wkwk land
  • 0
    @kambing well, wrong. other continent.
  • 1
    @chiri well, it's B2B. A kind of staff management application. Tech stack very classical, nothing special, Java/JSP/MySql+Javascript/Css/HTML
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