It depends... I've worked with hundreds of juniors & seniors during my consulting days.
I've had ups and downs in this situation, but on most cases it's about showing the light to a path forward.
In most cases, the software development was straightforward, and most of the coaching was about a how to behave in the organisation they were functioning in.
One can only have so many architecture/code quality reviews, typically we evacuated the seniority of the devs on their ability to cope with people (colleagues, bosses, clients, ...)
We did have a few very bright technical people as well, but those were about 10 on a 2000-person company.
The reason I explicitly mentioned the slightly autistic junior person, is because I've worked with one, who was about to be fired, because other people had issues dealing with him.
So I moved desks, sat next to him for over a month, and he ended up becoming the champion for one of the projects we were doing, because he was very bright, precise and had a huge memory, which mattered a lot in that context.
Other stories are similar, once they were about to throw out a colleague because he was taking days to do something that should have taken a few hours max. So I say next to him, to see what he was doing.
Turned out he was refactoring all the code his feature touched because he couldn't stand bad code. So we moved him to quality control, and last time I checked he was thriving...
I guess what I'm saying is that -just like with people -, you need to find a good modus operandi, and have matching expectations, but if you can figure it out, it will pay off dividends.
I've had ups and downs in this situation, but on most cases it's about showing the light to a path forward.
In most cases, the software development was straightforward, and most of the coaching was about a how to behave in the organisation they were functioning in.
One can only have so many architecture/code quality reviews, typically we evacuated the seniority of the devs on their ability to cope with people (colleagues, bosses, clients, ...)
We did have a few very bright technical people as well, but those were about 10 on a 2000-person company.
The reason I explicitly mentioned the slightly autistic junior person, is because I've worked with one, who was about to be fired, because other people had issues dealing with him.
So I moved desks, sat next to him for over a month, and he ended up becoming the champion for one of the projects we were doing, because he was very bright, precise and had a huge memory, which mattered a lot in that context.
Other stories are similar, once they were about to throw out a colleague because he was taking days to do something that should have taken a few hours max. So I say next to him, to see what he was doing.
Turned out he was refactoring all the code his feature touched because he couldn't stand bad code. So we moved him to quality control, and last time I checked he was thriving...
I guess what I'm saying is that -just like with people -, you need to find a good modus operandi, and have matching expectations, but if you can figure it out, it will pay off dividends.