alt Hacker NewsIf people would be as patient and inventive to teach junior devs as they are with llms the whole industry would be better of.
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The vilification of juniors and the abandonment of the idea that teaching and mentoring are worthwhile are single-handedly making me speedrun burnout. May a hundred years of Microsoft Visio befall anybody who thinks that way.
A constant reminder: you can't have wizards without having noobs.
Every wizard was once a noob. No one is born that way, they were forged. It's in everybody's interest to train them. If they leave, you still benefit from the other companies who trained them, making the cost equal. Though if they leave, there's probably better ways to make them stay that you haven't considered (e.g. have you considered not paying new juniors more than your current junior that has been with the company for a few years? They should be able to get a pay bump without leaving)
I spent a lot of time in my career, honestly some of the most impactful stuff I've done, mentoring college students and junior developers. I think you are dead on about the skills being very similar. Being verbose, not making assumptions about existing context, and generalized warnings against pitfalls when doing the sort of thing you're asking it to do goes a long long way.
Just make sure you talk to Claude in addition to the humans and not instead of.
You pay junior devs way way way more money for the privilege of them being bad.
And since they're human, the juniors themselves do not have the patience of an LLM.
I really would not want to be a junior dev right now... Very unfair and undesirable situation they've landed in.