Who Killed the Junior Developer?

I worked as a programmer for 1.25 years. I left 3 years ago, the company went bankrupt yesterday. When I last checked about it, I saw several of my coworkers replaced with someone else.

The boss kept adding people to his 10+ sales team, and I remained the only developer. Not very long after I joined I prepared a speech about needing a lot of time and preferably an extra developer to clean it up. The web app was written by 1 person for 4 years. No documentation of course, not tests, guess what also no version control. The boss had a sales background and I guess he considered salespeople sources of income, while developers - sources of expenses.

I guess I should be grateful that he hired me? Yes, but the only thing he cared about was if it works and how it looks from the outside. The few online comments there were on the bankruptcy article included one that said the place had mobbing, and another he was lucky he was rejected when asking for a job there because the interview was terrible. (When I was applying, I got a proposal to work with no contract in exchange for higher pay. I rejected that one.). I thought I was maybe paranoid or oversensitive, but now I'm sure I got hired in the first place because I looked desperate.

If I performed stellar, I would have a good success story, but there's limit to how many advanced topics a junior developer can pick up alone while still cleaning up. REST endpoints could really have helped against competition, but then again if he hired an experienced dev after me he would have saved him too. I made a point to write reST documentation describing everything I learned during refactoring/upgrading process, how to run tests, what the various modules are for, where the bottlenecks are, the staging server image, etc.

I fucked up when switching jobs and didn't sign a contract immediately. I thought a verbal agreement was enough. Then I was fired after 4 days, citing poor performance, slooow work speed etc. I never thought I was amazing, but with his other hand the new boss offered me to enter an internship program. He said I would learn a lot. He also sent me some Python video tutorials made by his friend (who works at a university). I told him I took mine from MIT and certainly don't believe a country whose best university is not in the top 400 globally could produce something better... and it was basically a backwater university, not even the top one. Later I found out he had a deal with an (state-funded) employment bureau. He was providing internship programs for aspiring programmers, and the bureau was super happy to send people on "training programs with guarantee of employment". Both parties were happy - the crook had a constant influx of temporary cogs, the bureau had could boast high effectiveness. I keep seeing new entry level developer jobs from that place, and yet the company is NOT growing.

Let me tell you it takes a tremendous amount of willpower just to train at home and remain employable. I've found that hands down the best thing I can do to keep getting job interviews is to regularly commit to github. I enjoy programming, but I'm not passionate about it. You can like strawberries, but 3 pure strawberry courses a day is too much for most of us. It helps to have not one but a variety of side projects so you can alternate between them, and at least one extra programming language (I rewrote someone's glitch art app in Rust).

It doesn't help job interviewers are kinda autistic. I don't mean in the "they suck" sense, but that they have major communication problems. They never tell why they didn't like you, you must infer it from their behavior and observe what kind of behavior gets you more interviews. They always think they can get another one, so why bother explaining anything. Depression + anxiety doesn't help. Dating is super fun by comparison. At least you get to see a pretty girl.

The bottom line: some people only hire junior devs to cut costs.

In the beginning, there were plenty of candidates that were suited for careers in software engineering. Now we are at the point where each school has fewer great candidates so they market to a bigger audience.

It's no longer scary or stressful. I now choose to switch jobs regularly because I get better incentives to join somewhere else and I get more bargaining power with each transition.

C-levels and shareholders made it this way - if they kept with market rates and the organisation put more value in employees and their IT I'd stay around. But I've been seeing more and more of a shift to outcome-based budgeting, maintenance and refactoring isn't even part of BAU budgeting - it's strapped on to project work. This is likely exclusive to non-tech companies (even though most companies are shifting towards tech as their basis ala "Software is Eating The World").

Managers can only do so much within an org, I haven't worked for a manager I didn't like (I've turned down jobs based on my interview process though). Not US based.

Code reviews are a reactive exercise. They allow people of influence to criticise work. But it is important that people of influence have first stepped up, and laid out a clear direction.

As the mentor, you should have a mental plan for their one month, three months and eighteen month progressions. If you do not have this in mind, you should not have hired them.

From here, you should set a tempo that steers the junior to grow. The things you are growing are their skills, judgement and initiative. You need to balance the need to make sure they are heading down a good path against the momentum of their own initiative, which is valuable but also prone to misfiring.

This path will be different for each person. So: have a plan, but be prepared to adjust it regularly.

There comes a crossover point where their judgement and ability becomes strong. You realise that your steering efforts are holding them back vs their own initiative. There should be some conversation where you explain that you are stepping back, and that they should be careful with the extra rope they will be getting. With graduate hires this will be at least eighteen months out.