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Sounds like you're doing a fine job.

One thing you can do is let people flounder and fail on irrelevant small tasks for a week or two early, to help them learn the lesson that they don't know what they're doing.

The best way to make someone appreciate guidance, is to have them fall on their face, receive guidance and notice the difference.

One suggestion I had was, if you're stuck for more than 30 minutes, ping me. Juniors will almost always be stuck with something trivial you can answer within a few minutes. It gives you a break and it is something they really appreciate. If you communicate to them that they're not expected to know anything and that the first few years on the job is their real world education and a chance to ask questions without raising eyebrows, they'll be far more likely to do it.

Juniors are nice in my experience, you can mold them into something half-decent if they've got a bit of a brain and their mistakes are ones of innocence, not cunning or apathy. It's the 'senior' devs who don't know shit that you have to put up with that's almost always a disaster. They'll be well versed in lying and politics, wasting everybody's time.




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