this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Namanyay, I’m sorry to say, sounds like a relative newbie when it comes to software development. The refrain “junior software developers can’t actually code” has been around as long as software development.
I remember when Stack Exchange first popped up, senior developers complained “junior developers don’t actually LEARN anything anymore; they just copy code off of Stack Exchange without understanding what it does!”
And before SE? We were doing the exact same thing in the comp.* newsgroups. And before that? When you started developing something, a senior dev dropped a bunch of books on your desk and said “when you’ve finished reading those, let’s talk.”
The truth is, ever since libraries have been a thing, the majority of developers have just used the libraries without really understanding what goes on inside them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — the entire point of abstraction is so that developers can focus on the stuff they need to get done while ignoring the already solved problems.
The issues arise when you place code monkeys in software architecture or senior development positions, and they’ve never had the curiosity to read through the header files for those libraries they use, but instead just let Claude code complete their way to functionality. Because then most style guides with teeth go out the window, as there’s no intention behind the choices made.
And this results in something that really irks (and always has) senior software developers: instead of writing really clean, performant and novel code, those senior devs have to spend all their time doing code reviews and editing and refactoring codebases that nobody else understands.
Same as it ever was.
This is exactly right.
I was guilty of copy and pasting from Stack Exchange to meet deadlines.
The only thing I would add is complaining that colleges don't really teach coding for the real world and all boot camps are a waste of time and money unless that's the most effective way you can learn.
In reality, coding is something you can learn on your own… or not. Colleges are good for teaching computing science and architectural design, but the good ones will assume you already know how to code. The problem of course, is that when you graduate you are unlikely to find a job as a computer scientist or software architect, and will most likely need to spend 5+ years as a junior programmer first.