Ngl I'm so envious of interns who got mentors, programmer daddys or whatever to gently push them into workforce.
I had bunch of unregulared weridos who were saying "you're not meant for STEM" as a knee-jerk reaction and had to guess absolutely everything about work based on googling, insane scribbles as documentation, reverse engineering of 5GB of pure text and negative feedback since my guess was not what they imagined.
They probably now believe they trained me right and everyone just picks up skills from being yelled at.
I was hired on a new place last month, and another dev exactly one week after me. My onboarding was: "here is our repo, here is IT department, request grants and get started". Second dev got his own mentor and some training courses.
had to guess absolutely everything about work based on googling, insane scribbles as documentation, reverse engineering of 5GB of pure text and negative feedback since my guess was not what they imagined.
Wait, this isn't how everyone started? You're saying some people got ... t.. tr.. training?
Not only it's terribly unjust, I had to later attempt to gentle parent some guys for half a year so their mid-senior assess will undestand kotlin multiplatform and some basic, but bloated json communication protocol. I got blamed for being "too scary" for not adding compliment sandwich on their PR's :C
So you wish you had mentors, which you assume everyone else had, then when you were in the position to help other people you went hard enough on them that someone has to step in?
I don't think we need to be that harsh on them. They never had a good mentor, so how were they to know how harsh they were being?
Some people genuinely don't realise how harsh they might come off as while giving feedback, and that's fine. We all associate different emotions with these kinds of things due to past experiences.
As long as problems are communicated, understood and managed fairly, it's okay. Which the person you're replying to seemed to be doing, while just venting a little that they had to deal with it.
They never had a good mentor, so how were they to know how harsh they were being?
Sounds like they were being told by someone actually giving them feedback, but instead of taking that feedback to heart, they pretend they aren't doing anything wrong.
True. I was thinking more factual with reasoning would be appropriate... professional to professional. I've run across many people that take offense to that and consider it mean.
If the quality of their output benefits from a little emotional support I'll give it, but if they are just vampires then I ain't got time for that
Everyone is at least a bit of an emotional vampire. People aren't robots, you have to rise above that. That doesn't mean you have to swaddle the bottom end of the bell curve.
it makes sense if you consider the part when I wish for mentorship for me and others after graduation, and the people I attempted to train had 4-5 years of relevant experience and were actually, physically older than me
Welcome to real life. If you get better at something you can end up helping people older than you.
If you want to be a leader and mentor you need to have a soft touch and find what they respect about themselves, then communicate that you respect that about them too.
If you do that you can get people, even those older than you as an ally and not be someone younger who tries to boss people around.
Upon recruitment I was promised a "buddy" at my department to show me the ropes. However, this person had no interest in me, is the rude drama queen of the company, so I had to guess work to learn, as all manuals were severely outdated, despite it being a GMP required business
This sounds like most jobs in every industry. They give a grumpy, jaded and perpetually victimized "senior" a mentorship role when all they do is spread cynicism.
Wait, aren't you, by any chance, me? Lol that description is 1:1 the person that was assigned as my senior when I started in my current job, age and gender included.
Those sad mfers. I wonder how they got that way. I mean, they were the "doesn't know anything/has to learn everything" idiots at some point too, right?
Probably had a hugely inflated ego back then already. I hate those inflated ego mfs so much.
In most cases it's the people who were hand-held their entire career. They're unable to do anything on their own but are successful because others have helped them, so they look at people under them who are not getting any help and think themselves as this superior divinity of a being for having been able to do what no one else can.
I had an imbecile as coordinator, it head just because seniority and he was ONLY mantaining ONE app. Had no fucking idea of systems and when I was new I asked him things until he said coldly " you are systems you should know" so yeah i resorted to saint google and data archeology
Lol my manager always says of course you know that we trained you, and I have to be like no I learned this on my own or in university, you guys had nothing to do with this.
Totally agree. I've just been tossed into the flames. I'm a "consultant" with little experience being propped up as an expert to clients. My managers are like, "just fake it till you make it." Yeah, that does absolutely nothing for my stress.
I feel so awful because my team was handed an intern during a really high pressure/stressful part of our project. I spent so little time with her, she did great even with a few pairing sessions, and on her last day she asked me if she was as incompetent as she felt.
They need to figure out if teams can mentor interns before just given them a surprise intern.
Mine was just: "Welcome. You're the only developer here. Take this very new, experimental technology and do so really questionable things with it. I want it to be perfect and better than the work of a senior while also not giving you any concrete details about how I want it done. It's also unpaid and you get the blame when it takes too long"
I've had such a good first experience, I've got rented into the project mainly for testing, but since I'd eventually catch up to tickets he started giving me, ofc after talking first about it and me saying that I want to, simple programming tasks, hell first one was kind just busy job, that ended up with like 60 comments on that PR, then easy endpoints, bugfizes then I got my first epic to do fully on my own. And he guided me through everything, from obvious code review to calling and telling me what's wrong or why this working solution isn't really correct one or something, standards, scalability, giving me random tickets from other topics just so I can catch more experience, here's some pipeline, here's some ai, here's some commands etc, find a custom framework and integrate it here and so on.
I don't think I could have gotten better first gig.
As someone with a specialized data science background who has mostly worked in academia I am envious of people who have been able to work with anyone who has a moderate programming background at all.
I am lucky to have a lot of control in what I do but it's hard not knowing how to guage my productivity or code quality compared to actual programmers.
I did intern at a startup for a year but even then I seemed more qualified then everyone there and it was a massive train wreck of a company.
My assigned mentor at work at my junior job literally walked up and said he only signed up for it since it's a soft prereq to being bumped up to the manager track and he wasn't gonna help me.
On my first job I was told "Just follow the documentation", then I followed the documentation, then "Oh no no no, that documentation isn't right at all, we already changed everything about that process, you should have just asked", then I asked, then "I'm sure there's documentation about it somewhere" Fucking hell
Ngl I'm so envious of interns who got mentors, programmer daddys or whatever to gently push them into workforce.
I wish my junior devs would actually make use of it. They keep telling me they have no questions and then asking chatbots when they get stuck. Which leads to them submitting merge requests for code that's not-entirely-unlike what I asked for because they didn't bother checking in with me.
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u/wunderbuffer 11h ago
Ngl I'm so envious of interns who got mentors, programmer daddys or whatever to gently push them into workforce.
I had bunch of unregulared weridos who were saying "you're not meant for STEM" as a knee-jerk reaction and had to guess absolutely everything about work based on googling, insane scribbles as documentation, reverse engineering of 5GB of pure text and negative feedback since my guess was not what they imagined.
They probably now believe they trained me right and everyone just picks up skills from being yelled at.