alt Hacker NewsJunior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1]
Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.
It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.
Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...
[1] Sources: all made up.
Agreed, juniors get a bad rap.
Something that complicates the problem is that not all juniors are the same.
Some juniors really just need to be shown the ropes and learn a few things and they can start contributing at mid-level. And then after a little bit of doing that they can start having Senior-level impact.
Some juniors take a little longer and need a little more help and that's totally fine, and they don't deserve to be ripped apart by smug seniors who forget they used to not know anything either.
And some juniors just don't really have the sauce and never really gravitate above mid-level, regardless of where their title ends up. Feel for these folks but they at times can be frustrating to work with.
But yes, to reiterate, in any case, the junior snark is hella annoying.