I simply don’t understand why a junior developer would want to work at a company that uses as much proprietary software as some shops do. What have they learned at the end of their tenure that they can apply somewhere else?
If employers hire junior developers for reasons other than that they have some capacity to train them (such as cheap labor), then, agreed, they are doing them some disservice.
But for folks that are not so junior, their insistence on rewriting libraries often is a consequence of a lack of confidence or misunderstanding about the purpose of the software project.
If you’re building a new database for use with your new language, yeah, it’s worth building it from scratch. But for many older shops, simple was made easy long ago through selection of libraries that don’t need to be rebuilt for pedagogical reasons.
We had a guy who left (a mess), before he left he asked one of the office Nice Guys his opinion on open sourcing a framework he wrote. Even the nice guy said it was a bad reimplementation of something that already exists.
The logical conclusion is that he was already looking to leave and wanted to take his homunculus with him, but my head cannon is that he realized his play time was over and people weren’t going to kiss his butt anymore.
There are distractions I find healthy and ones I find unhealthy and most weeks I’m trying to juggle the mix of both. Among the ones I don’t like are people asking me questions about my code that they should be able to answer themselves. That means I’m more open to questions from junior devs, because they can’t, but if people are stuck I want to make it easier for the next person. Or me in a year when I wander back into a project that was some definition of “done” before new requirements came in or my perspective on “good” has shifted (these two are not independent variables).
Agreed. “Be kind to your future self because time is not.”
We ought to want to train people up, but those that have been trained yet lack discipline are problematic. I’m certain that’s true across every endeavor.
