News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 200 times. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by mjr00 on Thursday December 11, 2025 @12:36PM (#46234428)
I have never worked with junior devs as incompetent as you describe, having worked at AWS, Splunk/Cisco, among others. At AWS even interns essentially got assigned a full project for their term and were just told to go build it. Does your company just have an absurdly low hiring bar for juniors?

> Giving juniors full autonomy is a great way to end up with an unmaintainable mess that is a nightmare to work with without substancial refactoring.

Nobody is suggesting they get full autonomy to cowboy code and push unreviewed changes to prod. Everything they build should be getting reviewed by their peers and seniors. But they need opportunities to explore and make mistakes and get feedback.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by pdntspa on Thursday December 11, 2025 @12:41PM (#46234499)
> AWS, Splunk/Cisco

It's an entirely different world in small businesses that aren't primarily tech.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by Philpax on Friday December 12, 2025 @12:14AM (#46241077)
Your experience is the outlier, not the norm. Most people don't work for AWS.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by mjr00 on Friday December 12, 2025 @12:26PM (#46246311)
Sure but I've worked for other places too, not just AWS. Including small startups and mid-sized companies.

All of them had bad juniors--and bad seniors--who people quickly learned could not be trusted with anything and were either fired or put into a situation where they could do minimal damage.

However none of them had blanket expectations of "juniors are too stupid to figure out how to solve problems and need step-by-step instructions." I'm sure some places like that exist, but I'd never want to work there; after all, if the place I'm working for openly admits it hires idiots, what does that say about me?

[ Parent | on HN ]