Let me start off and say I love my juniors. They’re great, friendly, kind, hard working. No one is perfect. Neither was I and neither were you. We all started somewhere and we all had to learn.
With that said, the latest batch of juniors seems to me a bit more… I don’t know how to describe it exactly. And I’m not trying to use generalizations that can trigger people.
But, it takes more explaining, more hand holding, more direct instructions. Sometimes it feels like I’m reading out an IKEA instruction manual for tasks where the directions have to be so clear and simple to follow, that it feels like their task is literally just doing the physical part of typing things out or moving the file.
All juniors, including me when I was a junior, don’t know much and need training. That’s the nature of a junior. But what im talking about is almost like they don’t care about the task enough to put independent thought into it or to take ownership of it. But when I chat with them, they’re really eager and i can tell they’re trying and do care. So it’s not the lack of care or investment.
Here’s a simple example. Imagine you need to have a contract with a certain provision in it applying to product type X. You talk to the junior about the contract generally, the provision, the purpose of it, and how it’s supposed to work for this product type X. You send them a sample of that provision and tell them it was used as to product type Y but the general provision can be used as a template as they put it into contract for product type X. The junior then sends back the contract with the provision in it, and it’s still applying to product type Y. They didn’t change it to apply to product type X. When you talk to them, they then realize that they need to do that and only then update it. So at the end, unless you also tell them “make sure you swap out product type Y and put in product type X when you copy and paste this provision in,” they don’t do it. So the instructions end up having to be so specific that it feels like they’re just doing the physical part of copying and pasting or editing, and little to no independent thinking and contextualizing.
But they’ve gone to great schools, have good resumes, seem eager to put in work, etc. And it’s multiple where it suggests it’s not a one off or a few atypical hires.
Anyone else noticing this? I wondered if it’s cause some went through school with AI and got used to AI doing the mental work, so perhaps some of them now are not used to on their own reasoning through things.