r/ProgrammerHumor 23h ago

Meme juniorLabour

Post image
2.6k Upvotes

87 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/Piotrek9t 23h ago

This feels like it was made by an overwhelmed Junior who has not yet realized that the Seniors still shelter him from the fucked up stuff

488

u/JestemStefan 22h ago

This meme is kinda accurate.

Junior thinks that he is doing all the work, but in reality his work has small impact on project direction, because they are not aware of all the things happening in the background

78

u/YouDoHaveValue 17h ago

In reality more experienced people set him up to succeed by carefully choosing his tasks and steering him clear of various land mines.

Also low key I purposely shift our most annoying customers from good devs to bad lol.

Enjoy nagging the guy who wrote a sortSortSort function because they couldn't figure out recursion. Best of luck with your project đŸ€—

14

u/heavy-minium 11h ago

It is, however, useless to attempt to generalize. I've seen different dynamics and situations between seniors and juniors that by now I understand there are many more important factors at play than the level of seniority.

3

u/LordFokas 3h ago

Sure, but still, the notion the Junior is pulling more load than a Senior is outlandish, except in maybe one or two situations where a senior might just be waiting to retire or for the company to dare fire him.

With the amount of juniors posting this kind of stuff here though, that must not be the case... statistically speaking.

-8

u/[deleted] 22h ago

[deleted]

24

u/zaskar 22h ago

Said the JR dev

176

u/chickitychoco 23h ago

And the senior built the tracks they’re running on

26

u/YouDoHaveValue 16h ago

I feel this so much.

They don't even realize how much heavy lifting our preexisting wrappers are doing for them.

41

u/Bannon9k 22h ago

Meanwhile it's the lead developer laying the tracks...

23

u/zaskar 22h ago

Braiding the high tension cables so that tiny ass engine can effect change

21

u/GIPPINSNIPPINS 21h ago

Holy shit I didn’t understand how much my senior mentor protected me from the BS till he left. They truly are hero’s in disguise.

29

u/chrissou 23h ago

True, they don't know and it's fine, they'll see later on

30

u/feldejars 20h ago edited 20h ago

Junior dev: codes a feature, unit tests fail, after a few hrs “everything” passes makes PR slight modifications/refactoring, then deploy to Prod (on a Tuesday)

Senior dev: wrote the unit tests, regression tests, integration tests, configured the CI/CD pipeline added the juniors devs PR to the change request and let him “deploy” while you do verification and eye ball the rollback version incase the metics on the data dog/grafana seem off.

Then the senior dev celebrates his win doing a prod deployment. Cuz the sr dev was the one on support and didn’t have to wake up at 2am

8

u/redditmarks_markII 15h ago

Or even a manager.  We had a hyper productive junior.  Manager brought up a few times how engaging and productive he is.  And how people liked working with him more than some seniors. To this day I still run into stuff I wished I had time to fix.  But it's just not quite critically broken.  And I got my own perf metrics to worry about.  But hey, that's my lesson right?  Write shit that either barely works or is flashy, fast.  deliver, move teams.  Don't stick around long enough for your sins to catch up to you, and people will love you for it, because ultimately we are all idiots.

17

u/WJMazepas 21h ago

There are places that use way too many junior developers to build everything

So many startups are like that

9

u/SpacecraftX 21h ago edited 3h ago

I've only dealt with 3 companies in my career but one was definitely like this. And the few seniors they did have were paid like juniors and were attritted so fast I had 3 managers in a year.

6

u/almostDynamic 16h ago

My seniors let me look at the fucked up base product stuff. Then when my eyes start to well up and I look at them with beady eyes they go “I’m here if you need some help with that.”

Like yes, holy shit bro. Literally all of this I was told not to do in school - Except now it’s on an enterprise codebase. Help me pleaseeeeee.

/uj To all of the solid seniors out there who challenge us, but don’t make us feel special needs when we have special needs - You’re a godsend.

3

u/invictus08 21h ago

100% I was going to say the same thing.

I remember those days. After years I realized my hubris.

2

u/totesoatsmuhgoats 12h ago

Amazon SDE1 here ✋. I wish this was true for me. It makes me happy to know there's not toxic, shitty co-workers just causing problems. I'm the "front-end" dev on my team and all our new devs to the team (SDE2 and 2 Sr. SDEs) are unhelpful, blocking, and confidently incorrect/ignorant that it makes me wonder how they have been so successful here (seniors on other teams have been super nice though!).

For context, I handled the entire front-end built with React for our team's flagship app but they wanted Java conventions and had 0 exposure to front-end OR React. They only bitched, created more work for me, didn't ask questions, and caused problems as if they intentionally avoided any possibility of providing assistance or learning opportunities. As for the PM, they made unrealistic promises and set me up to speak to their status updates in front of every stakeholder in out meetings with tight ddeadlines. I was basically the fallguy but also the only front-end dev??? lmao.

My point: it totally happens but I hope it's rare for everyone's sanity đŸ„Č

1

u/Stewth 9h ago

The most inaccurate thing here is that the project manager is not capering on top of the project, flinging their shit at bystanders.

1

u/Crafty_Independence 30m ago

In our organization it's the project manager who's the toy engine, because he doesn't actually have anything tangible to do with delivery but we let him think he does because we have to

195

u/JestemStefan 23h ago

What xd

Junior usually do some non critical/ maintenence tasks so they can learn and they require a lot of assistance. It's usually less work to do it yourself as a senior.

You could probably get fired tommorow and project will continue as nothing ever happened.

51

u/unpopularOpinions776 22h ago

this. i only give juniors shit that i’m not worried about. stuff that i could do 10x faster than them but i can also quickly see if they’ve done it wrong, so it saves me time

1

u/ArchMob 4h ago

Yes I noticed this 10x speed too without exaggerating. Is it universal in señor vs junior? I mean in construction for example, a senior might work 2-3x faster, even that might be a stretch

But your mindset is good. Save MY time instead of trying to make them faster or trying to deep coach them to be at my level

11

u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon 20h ago

Project will speed up lol

177

u/unpopularOpinions776 23h ago

no fucking way is this real. the juniors are tasked with dumb shit like localization or intro dialogs

29

u/oh_ski_bummer 22h ago

is this heaven you are speaking of?

38

u/unpopularOpinions776 22h ago

no it’s just a normal job. any place that has a junior doing critical tasks is a place you should be suspicious of

12

u/agfitzp 21h ago

Other signs are builds and tests, I joined a startup that had already been running for a few years but some of their components had no build infrastructure and no automated testing.

I fucked off out of there so fast I set a new land speed record.

1

u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon 20h ago

That’s my current role lol - my first task was to set up an integration testing framework for them

0

u/almostDynamic 16h ago

Idk. I run go-live critical task with a lot of handholding. Even I’m sussed out by the level of prod access I have.

That said. They know that I know what I’m touching - And I kind of appreciate that. I’m learning at light speed.

11

u/Gtantha 22h ago

Hahaha, it's true in some companies. Just a bit over a year into my first job and I'm winging projects completely alone. I wish I could work with other people on the same codebase together, but so far it has been one person per codebase. Maybe a project was transferred from one person to another, but I haven't seen two people working on the same codebase at the same time.

6

u/unpopularOpinions776 22h ago

you should find a new job. you’ll never learn the right practices by yourself

6

u/nightonfir3 17h ago

I disagree that its all bad. Yes you wont know how to do it the same way a senior at a large firm does it. But you can get paid to learn stuff nobody would let you near at a big company. Then you move over to a big company and look at what a big company did and you can actually understand because you tried to do it yourself and understand the problem space.

If your just trying to glide through with minimal effort you probably wont learn things though.

8

u/Gtantha 22h ago

Sure. Will you put in the work to search for a new job? Especially one where I don't have to move and don't have to work from home. Took me half a year to land this one while not working forty hours a week.

-1

u/unpopularOpinions776 22h ago

you don’t work 40 hours a week?

5

u/Gtantha 22h ago

To spell it out for you: I was not working forty hours a week while I was unemployed. Because, you see, unemployed means not having a job. Which means not working. Which means not working for forty hours a week.

11

u/werwolf2-0 22h ago

I was tasked to code the basis of the core part of our new project/product. The rough outlines and overarching architecture was given by the seniors, but I was creating the internal code structure. Worked out pretty well, we are still using it as I implemented it

3

u/SpacecraftX 21h ago

I was tasked with solo building a feature that I had done a tech demo for on a “hackathon” day that the company turned around and told the customer, Aramco, was already a feature that would be in the next release.

1

u/unpopularOpinions776 21h ago

your experience sounds unlike most. quit

3

u/SpacecraftX 21h ago

I did. That place sucked.

5

u/[deleted] 22h ago edited 19h ago

the juniors are tasked with dumb shit like localization or intro dialogs

Junior dev, first day in a new job AND new stack (went from React + Python, -> .NET Framework MVC, and jQuery). They tell me to clone their project, learn the codebase (the docs were just passwords), and implement a dynamic survey generator within 2-3 weeks because it was an urgent request from a client.

Idk which organized and sane world you're coming from, but it's definitely not "localization or intro dialogs".

14

u/JestemStefan 22h ago

It sounds your doing regular Dev job for junior pay then.

Or this survey generator wasn't mission critical.

Junior developers are investment. Assumption is that they will match the speed of the team and grow to be seniors

0

u/[deleted] 19h ago edited 19h ago

Or this survey generator wasn't mission critical.

It was a request from one of the largest adopters of the CRM, and they paid (the company, not me) a hefty sum to have it deadlined within 2 weeks. SMS/email notifications and all included.

Junior developers are investment. Assumption is that they will match the speed of the team and grow to be seniors

What happened to mid-level?

12

u/unpopularOpinions776 22h ago

clone the project from github

and that’s
 complicated? doesn’t that go without saying? lol

dynamic survey generator

so a system that stores strings and allows a selection of aforementioned strings?

yeah man. not pulling the train here

2

u/agfitzp 21h ago

Sounds like a make work project, I did something similar for one of our co-ops that we got when another team decided the didn't have room or time for a co-op

1

u/unpopularOpinions776 21h ago

my thoughts exactly. doesn’t sound missions critical to the business but like a rating tool for customers for NPS

0

u/[deleted] 19h ago edited 19h ago

and that’s
 complicated? doesn’t that go without saying? lol

The cloning part isn't complicated. Learning a legacy codebase while using a new framework to get productive without a senior was the complicated part. "Clone it and read it" was basically the onboarding process.

FWIW in the company I previously worked for, we ensured to make smaller feature tickets when onboard anyone from other teams because we believed that, when it comes to getting up to speed, working on small features to learn bits and pieces here and there works better.

yeah man. not pulling the train here

I... never claimed it was. I claimed that it was more than what the comment above said: "the juniors are tasked with dumb shit like localization or intro dialogs".

so a system that stores strings and allows a selection of aforementioned strings?

That made us an extra 2.5k as an urgent contract. I get us devs love looking at the technical difficulty of all, but if I made money by adding value to our client I'm good with storing strings.

0

u/crimson23locke 21h ago

Sweet summer child. You’ll get there one day.

1

u/Astrylae 22h ago

I got tasked to implement a cancel button, and refactor the camera system :)

1

u/ward2k 10h ago

The famous task of implementing a button

55

u/Blueberry314E-2 22h ago

This is some dunning-kruger shit right here

4

u/Merlord 12h ago

Par for the course for this subreddit

54

u/jdgrazia 21h ago

Accurate, Because you're not actually helping and they're still cheering you on.

8

u/-Kerrigan- 18h ago

Yeah! Junior will learn by doing. A good lead is neither overly challenging, nor overly supporting

6

u/YouDoHaveValue 16h ago

"Wow great job! Now just go ahead and filter on the server side instead of loading all the records locally and then filtering and I'll take another look!"

25

u/Friendlyvoices 21h ago edited 21h ago

The amount of work my junior developers do vs the amount they think they do is wild. "I spent all sprint on this component" sounds impressive to them, but there's a reason the number of points they get each sprint is half that of a senior dev.

When your stories go from "build a class that has x,y,z acceptance criteria" to "we have a request to build Google" you're in the senior territory.

12

u/YouDoHaveValue 16h ago edited 16h ago

For real.

I had one of my guys brag that he can get a dashboard of basic charts done in a week.

And I had to bite my tongue because I wanted to tell him okay you're picking it up but we need to get you to where you can turn that around same day.

11

u/TechFiend72 21h ago

This picture is missing the other senior developers laying the track out in front of the junior devs.

7

u/YeetCompleet 22h ago

2 person startups when they hire an intern:

6

u/Levibisonn 20h ago

Not a SWE but it's really staggering how as I have become more senior I'm expected to delegate and manage other people instead of taking on an actually heavier, more complex engineering load. I see a bunch of my senior colleagues (who are damn good engineers) not engineering at all and just PMing junior engineers /contractors. It's wild.

1

u/Piyh 2h ago

You're more valuable to everyone you if you can build more competent employees with your experience than limiting that experience to a single person doing implementation.

3

u/ososalsosal 19h ago

Junior: but Senior, during the worst issues there was only one set of footprints

3

u/ZunoJ 12h ago

I'd say the average CS student is about as competent as they ever were but I swear the worst ones have become so much worse they really think stuff like this is going on

7

u/OohSoDivine 23h ago

The project manager is not intuitively aware

2

u/wrex1816 21h ago

Juniors today really do think this.

1

u/cmgg 20h ago

This posts are bait, people. Do us all a favor and don’t engage with them.

1

u/babypho 15h ago

Missing the designer who suggests we pull a boulder instead of a train for aesthetic.

1

u/terminalxposure 10h ago

There is only one developer. The other players would be 4XProject Manager, Stream Leads, Scrum Master, Project Support Officer, Change Manager, Training, OCM Lead, Solution Architect, Security Architect, 3XTechnical writers, Cloud architect, Department Liaison, 2xCompany Partners, 3xEnterprise Architect, Service Design Lead, Service Delivery Manager, 2XBusiness Analyst, 10xTest Engineers, Product Owner and Sneaky Product Sales guy upselling shit

1

u/TechnoRhythmic 10h ago

I don't know where this happens. I always feel most senior developers (genuine developers) would rather write their own code than train a junior developer.

Most of the times for the initial few years (till the junior becomes a senior) - having the junior developer is an "investment" for the team - which they hope would pay off in the long run.

1

u/yoyotigre 5h ago

Every junior thinking that the copy-paste or any other boring task he got is what keeps that project and company alive :))

1

u/gauerrrr 2h ago

SEGFAULT

1

u/morrisdev 53m ago

So this is a toy train that thinks it's actually pulling a real train, and the 2 others are like, "really?"

Call me jaded, since this is the 3rd weekend I have to go to the office to rewrite some junior developer's code so we don't miss our deadline.

1

u/Huijiro 18h ago

I work as a solo developer for 3 projects at the moment on my company that has no senior devs. I'm classified as Junior 4 in the hierarchy, this feels exactly how it is.

0

u/GvRiva 22h ago

The infotainment software of a major car brand is based on the communication concept developed by an intern for another project. That intern isn't even working there anymore

1

u/zaskar 22h ago

Jag / rr ? I interviewed there and got that vibe

1

u/GvRiva 17h ago

Nope, bigger. Can't say the name, not going to risk the nda

1

u/zaskar 17h ago

Did they just drop support for Apple/android for what seemed like no reason? I plugged into one of those to see what I could see and I saw everything. I knew where to look. But this would make so much sense.

0

u/XWasTheProblem 18h ago

I was that junior (well, me and the other junior) except there was no senior, and nobody else really knew shit about programming.

It was not a pleasant experience.

0

u/pondwond 12h ago

I'd rather do a years work in a week than sit through those stupid meetings middle Management has their calenders full with!

0

u/TerryHarris408 8h ago

wow, everyone gets to be proud in this thread ^^

0

u/lukocat 7h ago

Atp I'm fine with this just give me a job

0

u/sporbywg 4h ago

I'm gonna show this to my boss! THANKS

0

u/sporbywg 4h ago

( I really need some staff! LOL )