How do you guys deal with juniors?

I’m currently going through the experience of having a junior coworker, and it’s been something completely new for me. In my previous jobs, I’ve always worked with colleagues who were at the same level or more experienced than me, so I’m not used to reviewing code or guiding someone on how things should be done.

To make it trickier, this guy tends to “vibecode” a lot, to the point that he can’t even explain what the code his Copilot spits out is doing.

I don’t really blame him though. Most of the mistakes he makes are things I’ve done myself at some point (like overcomplicating simple tasks). But now he keeps coming to me as if I’m his mentor, and honestly, I have no idea what to do with this guy lol.

Give him a lollipop :) Think about it :)

The way our Senior devs dealt with juniors was to give them exact expectations and specifications so there is no gray zone (because in that case they'll come bother you more).

As a Junior myself in some areas, the key thing to stick to when evolving is to try and figure things out myself and have solid communication with the team so that no one gets pissed off at each other. In this communication it should be specified not to complicate things and to keep it simple. Ad-hoc meetings are encouraged because a lot of the time a Junior sits there with a lack of confidence and is afraid of asking, slowing down progress. And set expectations; what is ok, what is not ok. How and when you may be bothered, when not.

Additionally, you could ask them to not vibe code (my Senior asked this) and to only work out solutions using Google and no A.I. whatsoever. This way should teach a Junior the trenches.

Communication, communication.

the AI makes things unnecessarily complicated btw

@jestdotty It really does. LLMs already spit out a lot of junior level shit like useless comments everywhere.

The junior really need to be taught to NEVER accept the auto-generated answer. Find all the problems and fix them .. never accept something you don't fully understand. If you don't understand it and it doesn't work, you probably need to rewrite it.

Right now I was doing a side project involving some audio socket tunnels.

Every junior said it couldn't be done because it had too much latency.

Enter setsockopt (and having to do it in C or python) to save the day.

No vibe programmer will ever learn that shit if left to their own devices.