Both have CS degrees but from what I would say are "mid-tier" universities.
After they completed training, I gave them both Copilot and our internal ChatGPT (which uses the API). I did notice some speed improvement but still not to the pace & standard that I expect.
It's illegal to suggest people to consider a different career path in our country. We unfortunately will be held liable for "encouraged" or "guided" termination.
Thanks for sharing how you code reviews with your juniors! You're definitely more patient than me in that respect. I'll try that out.
Our training program mostly revolves around teaching them the fundamentals, where I give them some specs & resources, and once they code that, I give a code review:
- They learned how to build some CLIs programs, where they make small clones of cat, find, grep, and cut.
- They learned how to build some basic data structures such as linked lists and some sorting algorithms.
- They learned some OOP by creating a CLI employee management system
- Also some Network Programming by replicating the core features of the rack gem, and building their own web framework from scratch
- They then take their hand-rolled frameworks, and they build the web version of the employee management system and ship it to heroku
- Other projects also include some common tasks in the company, such as creating their own authentication system.
- Lastly, they build their own design system using BEM CSS (a designer hands them a figma file, and they follow our internal CSS template / variables)
All of the above projects include code reviews, and the hope is that they learn how to become independent programmers & be able to contribute to any code, whether internal or open source. The goal is mastery of fundamentals.
I am not sure if I am too demanding -- our sprint is about 1.5 months long (0.5 months are for QA), but the expectation of that sprint is to ship one or a few features (e.g. a share button for a CRM for example).
After they completed training, I gave them both Copilot and our internal ChatGPT (which uses the API). I did notice some speed improvement but still not to the pace & standard that I expect.