[cbdevidal]

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room.

With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.

It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.

[rgblambda]

Guessing you maybe work in the consulting industry?

The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows what.

Dressing smart, talking smoothly, and being older looking (to imply experience to clients) are the attributes that get you a senior role.

[distances]

Not at all my experience of consulting companies. What I saw was that they were very useful training pipelines for juniors.

The companies would staff projects with a mix of seniors and juniors. Seniors to get started fast, in the right direction, and actually guarantee the delivery; juniors to keep the costs lower and to have a pipeline of new people. Hands-on from day 1, sitting with seniors in a project with clear timelines and deliverables, with projects and technologies changing regularly, tended to level up the newcomers fast.

This was in small to midsize (50-500) consulting companies where the projects did not come via CEOs being buddies with others.

[cbdevidal]

I just have never been in any kind of dedicated developer role. A sysadmin who happens to know development for the past 25 years.

And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.

[moron4hire]

I have worked as a software development consultant for more than 20 years and have never seen what you describe.

[jaggederest]

I don't know how much experience you have, and this also goes broadly for those looking but not commenting here, but if any of you would like a mentor, I'm happy to volunteer, contact info in the profile. Mentoring is, as far as I'm concerned, the most rewarding thing in the industry, and I want to do as much of it as I can handle.

Anyone else open to mentoring feel free to chime in, the more the better - mentoring is highly individualized.

[cbdevidal]

:-) I'll keep you in mind.

[culopatin]

I have the same experience. Getting hired with this background is weird. I don’t know how confident I should or shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t in consulting until recently. I like to put the focus on understanding the end to end workflows more than spending time worrying about my solution being the absolute best that would make HN drool over though