I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually understanding the issue. I can’t really even blame her, there isn’t much incentive to actually learn
That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?
I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these days.
Sure, but the overriding metric should be the opinion of the Sr engineer who is supposed to be mentoring and supervising the Jr
You'd hope, but, y'know, AI mania.
Very bad hire. I’ve gently said as much to my manager and skip. But for some reason hiring is hard and firing is hard, and we’re a small team, so I’ve been told to just lower my standards. Yeah, I know
I've been in situations like that. For me, it's like interviewing, I just keep backing off, lowering the bar, making it easier and easier until they can get it, then start going back up again. I pretty quickly get a confident read on where they are.
If at that point it's clear (to me) the situation is not salvageable, it's a management issue, I've done my job.
I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it.
Or at least it was.