This is my frustration at my current job. There's so much silliness and no one cares about avoiding it.

A less experienced dev suggested using "AI magic" to replace a URL validator. I protested, suggesting a cached fuzzy match solution (prepopulated by AI)... and no one cared. Now the AI model has been suddenly turned down, and our system is broken. We're going to have re-validate the whole system.

A younger developer who got promoted over me tried to write a doc on possible ways to fix it. He said "hey Dan, can you help me with this?" He got promoted over me because the way to get ahead is to write docs and have meetings, not do things sensibly. Now he's trying to use my work to demonstrate his leadership.

No one cares. The more I offer better solutions, the more it's a threat to less experienced developers. Things mostly work so my manager doesn't care. There's probably better ways for me to have handled things, but it's so exhausting fighting the nonsense and I just want to write good code.

As a junior I will share my perspective from the other side.

Companies have outlandish hiring practices. They want juniors who already know everything. That's why admitting that you don't know something is seen as showing weakness to the company in the eyes of a junior. Also, not knowing things will actively keep you from getting promoted.

I'm sure it's not like that everywhere but it's juniors playing the corpo game.

> So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to share it with.

seriously. it kills me to have so much knowledge and expertise that few people appear to care about if not downright hate me for wanting to pass it on to others as it appears institutional knowledge does not have any value these days

Wish I had you at my first engineering job at IBM. A couple senior devs there (not all) would get pissed when juniors tried asking them questions. Not only did it take a bit of courage to ask someone who had been there 20 years about something, but it was a 50/50 chance they were going to be an asshole to ya lol. Was a good learning experience for me - I go out of my way to mentor now.

I took a job in another state in large part because one of the interviewers was a highly skilled sysadmin that I wanted to learn from (I had basically backed myself into system administration as a career at my first job, a startup, so I didn't have a lot of people to lean on to learn my trade).

Of course, he turned in his notice shortly after I arrived, because he had found his successor. So, that didn't work out so well for me.

Im not even confident I can mentor a junior well. Part of that is probably mentoring is a seperate skill. (Like management is) and so you need to get good at that plus research the "many worlds" of their future paths rather than share your war stories. If that makes sense.

All the senior developers I have worked with are absolutely allergic to coming into the office, working closely with junior developers, and in general talking to people.

Whereas juniors are eager to chat, have lunch with you , and share what they’re working on, the seniors are guarded and solitary.

Maybe that’s just my workplace though!

And yes, the office is important.

Are juniors you ran into psychologically obsessed by being self-reliant ? or too proud of their own ideas ?

I also believe that some of seniors experience is flesh-level resilience. I'm no smarter than when I joined the industry, I just got used to being in the trenches, how to handle my own psychology, how all the easy-looking things are not and how the horrible ones aren't either.. I could explain this in detail to any junior, but until they're on the minefield it won't mean much.

I'm sorry this has been your experience. There are folks out there open to learning from us seniors.

I've been a mentor off and on for the last few decades, and I've been really lucky to have some strong mentees. Some I've followed for a better part of a decade and are crushing it out there. All I can really say is that they're out there, sorry I don't have any more helpful to say around how to find them etc. I'll mull on that for a bit..

Exactly my experience. You describe it more diplomatically than I do hah.

To me, young people just don't seem to know, or want to know, that information and knowledge can be gained from a person. It's the arrogance of youth x100

They have a supercomputer in their pocket/on their desk, and an AI that knows 'everything'. I can't imagine what it's like being a teacher right now.

How's your AI going to explain the office politics? The CTO's opinion on things? Talk about recent outages and learnings (details of which are not often on blogs)?

They think all they need is knowledge and facts and none of history, politics, communication etc

I think a lot of is that an AI or Google search won't challenge them, push them, disagree with them - and that's comforting to them, and more desirable than the learning that could happen

For all I know maybe you are an expert, but as a general rule of thumb - people are sick of "experts" eager to share their "expertise".

It's simply the case that the supply of "experts" wanting to share "expertise" vastly eclipses the demand by several orders of magnitude.

I think there's a business somewhere, where you get paid to listen to "experts" and they get to feel better about themselves. It's a win-win.

So if people don't perceive you as an "expert" and dont go to you for answers, you simply do not register as one or they have a rather high bar which requires observable undeniable artifacts (and I don't mean credentials, I mean software) and competition is rather fierce - there's simply overproduction of people who think they are "experts" and thus you have to give unmistakable symptoms of being one to register.

This is the key sticking point.

"It takes two to tango" i.e. junior developers must first put in some effort and then proactively seek out seniors with expertise.

It may be a cliche, but a truism nevertheless; viz. the juniors are simply not interested in putting in the necessary time/effort to gain knowledge systematically. They want everything to be quick, easy and handed to them on a platter.

I think the main reason for this is; there is just too much out there to learn and everything is being propagandized as being the most important and most indispensable; This swamps the juniors and hence they feel lost and try to keep up with everything which is a fool's errand.

Juniors need to keep the following in mind;

1) Change their learning mindset as follows; - Browse a lot, Read a subset and Study an even smaller subset.

2) Always focus on the essentials and not on the frills. This is determined by your specific goals/needs.

3) Be okay with not knowing everything. Do not base your self-worth on others evaluation of you.

4) Do not compete with others. Do the best you can and always improve on your yesterday's self. As the adage goes "drops of water falling, if they fall continuously, can bore through iron and stone".

5) Be confident in your own intelligence. As Sherlock Holmes said "what one man can invent another can discover". What might seem impenetrable in the beginning will over time become clearer and easier when studied regularly.

6) Everything is dependent on Self-Effort modulated by Timing, Context, Means Employed and finally Random Chance (i.e. lady luck). Manage the last by factoring in its payoffs as part of your self-effort itself (i.e. hedging). Focusing on the above five parameters before starting on anything will guarantee success.

7) You can always short-circuit your studies and gain knowledge quickly by asking seniors with expertise to teach you. Your attitude and way of approach is very important here i.e. you must be sincere and committed.

you have HN, there is always someone here, my friend :).