In my first dev job I was hired as 1 in a pair of jrs to start at the same time on the same team. We never got along. After about a year I was promoted and the other person was let go for performance reasons.

I never really put myself in the other jr’s shoes so thanks for sharing your story. At the time I was pretty intimidated by her and all the other engineers, I can only assume it was much worse for her.

In retrospect it was obviously a bad idea to hire 2 jrs at once. It was a small company (~10 engineers) and we were their first jr hires. I think the company thought that it would foster camaraderie and a little healthy competition, but I think most jrs have too much impostor syndrome for that to work out.

On a side note I think they did have a good onboarding program for new developers. Outside of normal jr level tasks it was roughly 50% technical support: talking to customers, collecting bug reports, reproing bugs, then finding the right engineer to fix them. Over time I started diving into the code myself to see if I could find what was breaking, then eventually putting up fixes myself. It was a good way to contribute real value to the company while learning how a codebase works.