Yea, um, nothing wrong with mentoring and teaching but when management wants me to turn things out on a dime at the same time. Not happening. That junior is getting MINIMAL possible attention for me to work on what ultimately keeps my job not theirs.
Is that really true? Maybe some, but I don’t know about “many”. I’d imagine when most people start on their dev career, they don’t imagine their dream job to be “teaching,” they imagine it to be coding. I think you’d have a tough time getting responses for a “senior engineer” job ad that says you’ll actually be a full time mentor.
This route exists, it's called training and you can earn even more doing that. Absolutely doable, but it's a long road to get there (salary- and lifestyle wise).
At least in the above scenario, it was Andres doing the work of initially getting someone up to speed and then pairing the coworkers on an appropriate level feature/bug. He'd stop by and check in to see where they were stuck and would genuinely try and solve the problem.
So, it has to be someone who is a great coder for that stack and enjoys teaching.
If it's done right, other members of the team become good teachers as well, so the initial burden of teaching is lightened.
> how do you keep the senior developer who you've turned into a tutor happy?
Pay them well, and give them a regular chunk of (paid) time to work on something that furthers their growth / is intellectually stimulating / whatever.