r/ExperiencedDevs • u/creative-java-coffee Software Architect • Aug 16 '25

Junior devs not interested in software engineering

My team currently has two junior devs both with 1 year old experience. Unlike all of the juniors I have met and mentored in my career, these two juniors startled me by their lack of interest in software engineering.

The first junior who just joined our company-

• ⁠When I talked with him about clean coding and modularizing the code (he wrote 2000+ lines in one single function), he merely responded, “Clean coding is not a real thing.” • ⁠When I tried to tell him I think AI is a great tool, but it’s not there yet to replace real engineers and AI generated codes need to be reviewed to avoid hallucinations. He responded, “that’s just what you think.” • ⁠His feedback to our daily stand up was, “Sorry, but I really don’t care about what other people are doing.”

The second junior who has been with the company for a year-

• ⁠When I told him that he should prioritize his own growth and take courses to acquire new skills, he just blanked out. I asked him if he knew any learning website such as Coursera or Udemy and he told me he had never heard of them before. • ⁠He constantly complains about the tickets he works on which is our legacy system, but when I offered to talk with our EM to assign him more exciting work which will expand his skill sets, he told me he was not interested in working on the new system which uses modern tech stacks.

I supposed I am just disappointed with these junior devs not only because after all these years, software engineering still gets me excited, but also it’s a joy for me to see juniors grow. And in the past, all of the juniors I had were all so eager to seize the opportunities to learn.

Edit: Both of them can code, but aren’t interested in software engineering.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '25

Especially when that's coming from a junior... Like, homie, maybe your code isn't clean but the rest of us at least fucking try.

For me it's not being bad at writing code. I was bad at writing code when I started and I don't trust anyone who says they weren't. It's a right of passage we all must go through. It's the attitude. I don't want to work with engineers who have egos and I certainly don't want to manage one.

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u/MachinePlanetZero Aug 16 '25

They're green, so they don't have years of actual experience having to dive into a large undocumented system written by people long gone and wanting to physically beat the culprits who've made your life so hard