Episode 536: Mentoring and how to help my team not lose their soul to AI?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Dave and Jamison, long time listener first time caller. I appreciate everything you do, I look forward to my Monday morning commute because of this podcast.

   I’ve been a software developer for about 4 years. I’m a career changer and graduated from a boot camp. I was fortunate enough to earn a junior developer position at a non software company and have been promoted during my tenure. I work on a small team and enjoy what I do and the level of impact I have. I am one of the most senior developers. My only concern is that I do not receive direct mentorship from more experienced developers.

   Am I limiting my future prospects by not job hopping? When is the right time to leave a company and seek new opportunities?

2. Hello Mr. 💃 and Mr. Smith. I’ve been working in software ~6 years. In the same company (don’t judge). And about a year ago I advanced in the position of a team lead of 4 developers. I would actually like to attribute this advancement, at least partially, to listening to your podcast. Although luck was involved as well. ANYWAY. There were quite a few questions on how to keep your soul intact while working with Claude. And your advice was to focus on product side, and\or to focus on improving the processes. Now my question is - how can I help my teammates to not lose their soul? How can I help them to not turn into meat proxies? We work in the startup, so tasks are not defined in details. Which does give them some agency over whatever they are building. But I don’t think it’s enough anymore. I think one specific teammate leans toward copying the task description, throwing it at Claude and making a PR out of it. With very few iteration over the quality of the code. Can i blame them? Not really. But how can I help? It’s like the ownership of the code was taken from them. And from me, but at least i can do other stuff. For the context - I am reviewing the PRs manually. Please spam me with idea. Saying to the team - just don’t use AI is not an option, because the speed will go down. A lot. Plus we all are 100% addicted.

   PS Most of my developers have experience of +2 years in the field. One is completely fresh and started half a year ago. Maybe for him the approach should be different? He is pretty good at not generating complete slop. But I think for him it’s even harder to learn and to read all this code.