[OliverGuy]

Graduated June last year from my CS course at a good middle of the road uni that's well know but not for CS specifically.

Got a DevOps type role February of this year.

Pay is terrible, not much above min wage (UK), but should have a 50-100% increase once I've been there a year. Happy with that pay as its an excellent environment with a excellent team and a modern tech stack (hybrid cloud, k8s, lots of new AI/big data type projects happening) and where I have a very wide scope to learn new technologies and get stuck in with interesting things.

I do wonder how a junior dev can be anything other than a net positive (maybe devops is easier, doesn't feel like it...) for a company. I've taken up very little of more senior team members time to get up to speed, but then again we have good docs... It doesn't feel like I'm a burden and I'm definitely producing lots of value for both the 'devops team' and the 'development teams' we support. Maybe my personality and abilities skew my view but is it really that hard to hire junior devs that are proactive about learning and can be left to figure it it?

[amoorthy]

Thanks for sharing your experience and glad to hear you've found a good job/team/product-environment!

My experience working with junior devs is that while they may be smart they haven't worked in teams and contributed to large codebases. So they may struggle to understand how a larger codebase is structured, where is the optimal place to fix an issue, how to structure their own code to be maintainable longer term etc. So code-reviews take longer, with seniors sometimes having to refactor a large amount.

I think some younger devs that contribute to open source projects do much better in this regard.