Comment by Vampiero

It's cheaper to hire 5 juniors and to give Tim a mental breakdown than it is to hire 5 Tims.

Realistically though, if you really did hire 5 Tims you would deliver in 1/5th of the time and the software would actually be decent on the first iteration.

It seems to me that consultancy companies actually want inexperienced developers because they can bill their inexperience to the client as they train them to become useful. Awful and, as stated, a major source of mental breakdowns for the Tims who have to put up with their bullshit. And also for the juniors who are always running from fire to fire as they try to fix the clusterfucks they created.

This is not how you should do stuff, but it's how everyone does it. At some point it's just the blind leading the blind, because Tim also has other shit to attend to and can't review every LOC on every PR by himself.

I didn't become a senior by being mentored by other people, btw. I became one because I've always loved doing what I do, and nothing more. The internet and physical books mentored me impersonally. So I'm sure that they can mentor other people just fine, and I don't see why I should waste my time just because my boss is stingy and can only hire a couple of people with my experience or drive to learn outside of work.

And let's be clear -- mentoring and being taught something are two very different things. I'm not anal about the latter. I'm anal because I want to write code, I don't want to tell people that they should learn to fucking read the error messages and google them every 5 seconds.

Though right now I'm being very brutally honest. I'm actually nice and friendly to them in person, and I'm very patient. But that causes me to break every once in a while because I secretly loathe it!