But the ‘learning the skills as you go’ part is where the seniors come in. I’ve benefited immensely from the code reviews which took things that technically worked but we’re convoluted and transformed them into code that could be maintained and read easily.

Now that I’ve had some mentorship I can be productive on my own, but yeah, it took some work.

The senior devs get pulled into meetings, customer escalations, bug reviews, etc. all the time. The juniors, now trained and competent are free to code all day and get the work done because they have fewer responsibilities.

Yes, it takes work to get there, but it’s worth the effort.

This is where a high quality on-boarding program comes into play. Yes, a dev fresh out of college or code boot camp, with little or no real world experience, is going to be unproductive individually.

As the employer/manager, you need to work to minimize the period of time this is the case and ensure those junior devs quickly get to a point where they can work individually.

I mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion - we have a 1 month on-boarding program for new devs. They all arrive at the same time (summer after graduation), stay near HQ, and work through all the common training together (some tech, some culture, some "how to be an adult", etc). They also work through a simple, but in-depth (UI, API, build pipeline, etc), group project. And wrap up with a two day hackathon for fun (done in common with the summer interns).

Good junior devs are fairly rare, too - I wasn't claiming you find them everywhere.