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Comment by humbleMouse | Hacker News Reader

If your organization has a junior putting out "fires" in production after 3 weeks, a few major things are wrong. First of all, code shouldn't be "on fire" frequently in production. Especially a domain of functionality that is simple enough for a 3 week old junior.

Honestly I can't think of as valid reason why there would be something breaking in production that a junior with 3 weeks of experience on a team could fix. Where are the dev ops people? Why is the production code so fragile? If the "fire" is easy enough for a junior with 3 weeks experience on the codebase to put out, why is it even a problem in the first place? Many questions here.

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Yeah, this. It's great that the poster leveraged it as a learning opportunity and could handle things, but it speaks to the poor quality of the organization/team that this would be an issue to begin with. But of course we have limited details.

Also, when you're a green software engineer it can be hard to know when to ask questions. You definitely don't want to ask too many questions which are trivial and easily googleable. But you also don't want to spend 4 hours figuring something out that a teammate could explain in 10 minutes, unless their time really is 16x more valuable than yours.

Not to put the original poster down but I was hired into a similar role but that was with 8 years experience plus several years sysadmin experience.

I was in a similar situation. In my case, i was on the ops team for a big chunk of the company, so it had an unusual amount of fires in production. I was rushed into oncall basically only because the existing rotation was only 2 people and they were very miserable. Later the company made more structural changes to relieve the situation (e.g. dev ops).

Sounds like the team lead is very desperate for external help. I worked in a startup where I contributed to production code two weeks after. I was at intermediate level at that time. But the team was short of people and needed extra hand at any level.

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