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I think this kind of thing really comes down to the situation. You have not provided much detail here. There are cases where something like this can work very well (low scope project, low amount of proprietary information) and cases where it may end up in disaster (very large scope, misleading information, footguns). Particularly, fixing fires is one thing. Writing high quality code that follows good patterns is another, and leaving a junior to just "figure it out" doesn't actually make much sense. Often things like "accessibility" are just forgotten completely. One can always try to pull themselves out of a bad situation, but that doesn't hide the fact that efficiency was lost, and from what I've seen, rather than creating lots of excellent engineers via such a trial by fire, you rather get a lot of missed old knowledge and reinventing the wheel combined with people getting high egos and thus getting very defensive over whatever it is they got attached to during their trial by fire. Yes, the work gets done, but how well, and do we care? As an industry, we seem to do a poor job of gathering and reinforcing good practices. I still encounter completely opposing silos that often have no clue the other exists. And everyone seems very strangely certain in the correctness of their choices. > My team races at a million miles per hour I must ask, though, what is this magical company? > My manager during performance reviews would heap praise on me for being so green and yet so low-maintenance. And I'm very curious how much you're paid. |
I fully agree that I, by necessity of my lack of experience, have made mistakes and lost efficiency. I have engineered things suboptimally. I have cut corners to get some feature out the door. But I also recognize that the business I work for cares about earning money, not about making nice software. My managers like me because "I get shit done."
> I must ask, though, what is this magical company?
In terms of my company. I work for a company with ~250-300 devs. The total employee count is in the high 400's. It is not a unicorn. The yearly revenue is something like 50 million USD, and we operate at a break-even in terms of profitability.
I work on a team of 4 overworked sysadmins. I would say the team's "product" is managing the production application + all dependencies (way too many dependencies...), an ETL pipeline, and VDI. At least this company has an IT team to deal with stuff like printer/WiFi/laptop issues.
> And I'm very curious how much you're paid.
My salary is 82.5k CAD with ~1.5 years of experience.
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And as a reply to most other people commenting on the parent. Yeah, mentorship is probably the best way to develop a career. I think it really is a luxury, though, and probably very few companies do it right. I wish I could have gotten some guidance, but I didn't. I'll just make do with what I've got. It's worked so far.