I've been at my current company for just over three years. I manage a small team of developers at a medium-sized consultancy, building internal tooling for our data analysts.
One of my junior developers started the same day I did; we went through on boarding together. He's in his mid 20s, this is his second job post-college, after having an abysmal experience entering the workforce during COVID. He's had some struggles with learning to code but has taken my advice to build side projects for things he is interested in and has really started to take off. He got married last year and just last week bought a house.
One of my developers was a brand new junior, having started her first job post-college just a few months before I started at the company. When I first met her, she apologized to me. She hadn't done anything, she was just that kind of mousy person whose obviously been ground down by everyone around her for her entire life. I started making her deliver our project status updates. I also give her full projects that she works on her own with no input from me, other than whatever advice she herself asks of me. She finished her master's degree in computer science last year and also recently bought a house.
One of my more recent developers came to us from after 10 years of working on-site on military bases. She'd been stuck in a corner, made to maintain large legacy projects on her own, over looked for promotion her entire career. She's one of the best project managers I've ever seen. I have her deliver all of our presentations to the C-suite (and there are a lot of them). She just got engaged and I recently got her promoted for the first time in her career.
One of my former developers came to me from a different part of the company. He came to the company after being a medic on active duty in Afghanistan. His former team couldn't figure out what to do with him and when the contract on which he was working expired, they didn't bother to find a new one for him. He had told his supervisor he wanted to be a programmer, not an analyst, and somehow his supervisor knew I was looking for people. He was an absolutely terrible programmer. I spent multiple sessions a week working on mentoring him. Ultimately, I suggested he find another company and helped him find one that I thought would fit him better, something smaller, not in consulting, that could have more time to work directly with him, and kept him busy with documentation tasks until he could transition with no down time. He still sends me updates on LinkedIn. He also bought a house and is getting married soon. He loves his new job, misses our team, but says he's learning a lot more now.
Our company is one of the worst places to work as a software developer I've ever seen. Not quite the worst in that nobody is yelling at us or threatening us with violence, but our management has absolutely zero understanding of the business of software development. It's incompetent-bad, not evil-bad. The actual projects are ludicrously bad with no direction. My boss listens to me in our one-on-ones with bewildered eyes as I describe the cacophony of dumb ideas from our C-suite stakeholders, folks he has no involvement with because my team is matrixed out to internal work. He mostly just lets me do whatever I want as long as the timesheets get signed on time. I love working here. I also recently bought a house, my first one in my life. Oh yeah, we live in Northern Virginia, BTW, houses ain't cheap here. But I love working here despite all the product idiocy because I don't see my job as building software, I see it as building software developers.
Fuck calling a computer program a "teammate." A computer program is not going to have a brilliant and beautiful life. We only do any of this shit because it's in the service of people.