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In my first dev job I was hired as 1 in a pair of jrs to start at the same time on the same team. We never got along. After about a year I was promoted and the other person was let go for performance reasons.

I never really put myself in the other jr’s shoes so thanks for sharing your story. At the time I was pretty intimidated by her and all the other engineers, I can only assume it was much worse for her.

In retrospect it was obviously a bad idea to hire 2 jrs at once. It was a small company (~10 engineers) and we were their first jr hires. I think the company thought that it would foster camaraderie and a little healthy competition, but I think most jrs have too much impostor syndrome for that to work out.

On a side note I think they did have a good onboarding program for new developers. Outside of normal jr level tasks it was roughly 50% technical support: talking to customers, collecting bug reports, reproing bugs, then finding the right engineer to fix them. Over time I started diving into the code myself to see if I could find what was breaking, then eventually putting up fixes myself. It was a good way to contribute real value to the company while learning how a codebase works.

[pc86]

I have such mixed feelings about healthy competition in this context. I really enjoy it. If I do something a little more performant, or a little faster, I feel good. If I don't, I legitimately look forward to learning what I could have done better (sometimes it's just "be faster" and there's not much you can do in that respect). But honestly I think I'm in the minority in that aspect. I enjoy doing LeetCode even though I'm not particularly good at it (50/50 shot at solving a medium on the first couple tries, at best). But I know a lot of people who are great developers that would crack if they thought they were constantly being compared to someone else, and these are people with the benefit of a decade+ of experience.