But the ‘learning the skills as you go’ part is where the seniors come in. I’ve benefited immensely from the code reviews which took things that technically worked but we’re convoluted and transformed them into code that could be maintained and read easily.

Now that I’ve had some mentorship I can be productive on my own, but yeah, it took some work.

The senior devs get pulled into meetings, customer escalations, bug reviews, etc. all the time. The juniors, now trained and competent are free to code all day and get the work done because they have fewer responsibilities.

Yes, it takes work to get there, but it’s worth the effort.