There was a miss in the expectations from the beginning.
“I was hired as junior and I’m expected to contribute from the off;”
That’s language for being setup to fail. Anyone who hires a a junior engineer or even early mid level and expects quick ramp up, fully flushed designs, instantaneous tickets being finished is delusional and, in my opinion, not fit as a lead at all.
When a junior is brought onto my team
1. I don’t expect them to know anything, they need to learn all of it and sometimes it takes multiple attempts
2. They are not in charge of designs, they take well defined tickets to completion
3. If it fails in production it’s my fault, they need breathing room to make mistakes
4. My ROI horizon is 6 months to a year
Shaming someone for failing never works. If it doesn’t work for important stuff like parenting why would it ever work in a corporate environment.
Not necessarily "mismatch" or "being setup to fail", it depends entirely on how much mentoring, hand-holding, code-review, test, documentation, wikis etc. there is. Onboarding and managing new hires is a key component of a healthy company culture. Lots of companies pay lip-service to this, few walk the walk.
> Shaming someone for failing never works.
It's perfectly ok to fail (otherwise you'll never learn), and shouldn't result in them getting punished or summarily losing their job, but the person simply needs to show they learned from their mistakes (and there needs to be a culture which actively rewards sharing knowledge and enables people to learn, not just blamestorming or hazing). For example, a company not having a wiki/ Slack channel/ internal/ departmental mailing-list where such stuff can be safely and frankly discussed, and gets meaningful constructive non-backstabbing responses, is a bad sign. But it's common.
“I was hired as junior and I’m expected to contribute from the off;”
That’s language for being setup to fail. Anyone who hires a a junior engineer or even early mid level and expects quick ramp up, fully flushed designs, instantaneous tickets being finished is delusional and, in my opinion, not fit as a lead at all.
When a junior is brought onto my team 1. I don’t expect them to know anything, they need to learn all of it and sometimes it takes multiple attempts 2. They are not in charge of designs, they take well defined tickets to completion 3. If it fails in production it’s my fault, they need breathing room to make mistakes 4. My ROI horizon is 6 months to a year
Shaming someone for failing never works. If it doesn’t work for important stuff like parenting why would it ever work in a corporate environment.
End of rant