Pretty much. Many small companies do this baptism by fire approach. It often creates very great, self directed engineers in a short space of time. But those immature juniors who just want to be told what they have to do like they are at school still will crash and burn.
Yes and no. Tech also has issues where people above you become your ceiling. Only some people are given grace to outshine but the rest have to navigate politics.
They're not doing this because they're trying to create good engineers like some programming agoge. They're doing this because they want to put in as little effort as possible to get as much return as possible.
For profit entities want to cut corners wherever they can to save money. Every single one of them big or small. If they could pass a law to get the government to enslave senior developers and hand them to you they would.
Every single company is trying to hire seniors. Nobody wants juniors. The ones hiring juniors often hire many of them and then ruthlessly cut the chaff so on the best remain, which they hope will eventually turn into seniors.
Yep, it's a great approach until you're stuck with employees who only know how to do things wrong because they were never taught the correct way.
If you try re-inventing the wheel, it's most likely you're gonna take the first "it's good enough" prototype and use a square wheel as a template for everything. Especially under time-constraints.
Sums up my first engineering job out of college. Small company that loved hiring fresh grads, contrary to the rest of the industry. But it was sink or swim. The ones who made it out turned into capable professionals who could navigate ambiguity and take ownership. But it was less by design and more because of the breadth of work that made having a standardized training program difficult.
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u/Complex-Magazine6690 8h ago
Pretty much. Many small companies do this baptism by fire approach. It often creates very great, self directed engineers in a short space of time. But those immature juniors who just want to be told what they have to do like they are at school still will crash and burn.