Experienced employee told by boss to "just delegate" their work to an unqualified junior staffer, which has left them feeling vulnerable and like their boss wants to replace them: 'Meanwhile, the boss keeps talking about "improving AI adoption"'

Now we have AI, too. Which has offered another “miracle solution” for completing more work in less time… with less cost. The very idea of combining “just delegate” with “have AI do it for you" has managers everywhere salivating. But, as anyone who has worked extensively with AI already can tell you, while it's good at taking care of those basic tasks, judgment and experience are still important. You need to be able to spot where things have gone sideways or got overcomplicated where to anyone without that knowledge things would look just fine.

Plus, sometimes you find yourself taking more time trying to get that prompt just right so the agent actually understands what it's trying to do, and before long you find yourself realizing it would have been easier to do it yourself in the first place. And that's before you run up against context windows where the agent is actively forgetting what you first instructed it to do, but doesn't tell you so. And, with sunk cost of time already trying to get the agent to work right, you're forced to stick with it and try to get a workable result.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Anyways, that's a bit of what's happening here in this story. 

This experienced developer has worked at the same company for around 5 years and has gradually become everyone’s default emergency contact, handling late-night problems and helping colleagues through crises without receiving the same support. Now, their boss keeps insisting they delegate work to a junior employee who joined only around a month ago. The problem is, the junior employee doesn’t have the experience necessary and still needs detailed guidance on nearly every task. So, handing over the work means adding training duties to an already exhausting workload.

They detailed, in their account of events, how they became the “go-to” person whenever there was a crisis.

I've been at this company about five years. Somewhere along the line I became the person people call when a deadline is tight or something blows up at 2am. 

It's not necessarily their job, just the role they have found themselves fulfilling. Which means they find themselves frequently working after hours and absorbing time-consuming tasks that don't necessarily translate to their own KPIs.

Not because it's my job. Because I apparently have no life, so I'm always available.

So now I get the after-hours stuff. I'm the one who checks the alerts. I'm the one who helps everybody through their crisis. When mine happens, nobody picks up.

This, undoubtedly, has meant that they are struggling to keep up with their own workload, which has pushed conversations about workload management and delegation with their own manager, who is insistent that they delegate to a junior staff member who has been working with the organization for “about a month.”

The problem is, this junior staff member also represents a significant time and resource investment for the experienced developer, who finds themself needing to hand-hold every task she completes while she learns the ropes. 

What's been wearing me down is the delegation thing. My boss is fixated on it. He keeps telling me to hand my work over to a junior they hired about a month ago. 

Fine in principle. Except I've had to walk her through basically everything she's done since she got here. Which command to run, which screen to check, what to look at when it's wrong.

The experienced developer further elaborated on the areas where she felt the junior employee might not be up to the task, not taking the time to solve things for herself before asking questions about them.

This has left the employee feeling rather annoyed and disgruntled about the persistence of the junior staffer, who even trails behind them like a baby duckling to the parking lot while they take their break… when they just want a moment alone.

She also asks me about things that already have a trail of tickets and three people who've done them before. She doesn't read the history first, doesn't check whether the person she's asking is buried. She just asks. Some of the questions are genuinely funny.

Example. I go outside for a sm*ke, because that's my break. She follows me out and starts asking about a ticket. If I'm standing in the parking lot with a c**arette in my hand, I'm on a break. That's a thing people can read.

But, regardless of this, the boss proceeded to give her critical and sensitive work that she wasn't qualified to handle. 

When they asked their boss about this, he said that she simply needs to “warm up.”

Then my boss gave her advanced firewall work. Production firewall work. I didn't touch a firewall until four years into my career. She's a month in and asked me last week what apt clean does. I can't follow the logic.

I asked him about it. He said she needs to warm up, get familiar, and that I'm the one who'll be teaching her. My take is the opposite. You prove yourself on the small stuff you were given, then you get handed things that can take down a network.

The developer has been left wondering whether or not their boss is simply trying to justify shifting some of their work to the junior staffer in an effort to reduce future costs. 

Honestly the whole thing would be easier if he just said it out loud. "You're expensive. There's someone here on half your salary. I'm moving your work to her. Teach her, then go." I'd say fine. I wouldn't even argue.

This, amid a load of low-quality work that is being pushed through by staff who are using AI tools to ship code that they don't understand. This has left the developer concerned about the stability of projects. Though they use AI themselves for some tasks in their work, they always double-check the output.

Then there's the AI thing.

People using AI to answer tickets they don't understand. People shipping code and deployments they've never read, then coming to me when it breaks. Somebody takes an AI-generated change and wrecks an environment on a project I'm on. I use AI. I just don't make a show of it, and I check what it gives me before I act on it. Which apparently makes me the odd one out.

And the boss? Well, he has been driving this. Pushing the team to move forward with AI adoption. This has left the employee wondering how they can turn the corner “from the inside” and shift the narrative. Wondering how they can go from essentially training their (unqualified) replacement in an organization that is chasing AI over-reliance as if it is going out of fashion. 

Meanwhile the boss keeps talking about "improving AI adoption" and "moving it from an individual habit to a team culture." Translated, that reads: put everything you do into a pool so the AI can do it and I can get rid of you.

I have debt. That's the honest answer to why I don't just leave. So I go in, I do the work, and I get quieter about it.

Has anyone actually fixed this from the inside, both the after-hours default and the train-your-replacement thing, without quitting?

In another similar story, this developer with nearly 10 years of experience shared how their team, which already used AI tools, was told by their boss to stop writing code themselves. According to the developer, the resulting code became harder to understand and repair, while management continued demanding perfect results under aggressive deadlines. They also say the boss started promising clients a 10-hour turnaround after receiving a 20-hour estimate, fueled by a belief that the AI would be able to achieve that turnaround. 

I wish I was exaggerating. I've been in the industry for nearly 10 years and I've never had a situation quite like this.

My boss recently heard someone on a podcast talk about using AI for development, and now he's fully convinced it's the only way to build software.

The thing is, we've already been using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for almost two years as part of our workflow. It's not new to us.

But now it's gone from "use AI as a tool" to "you're not allowed to write code anymore." Writing code yourself is considered "wasting time," and everything has to come from AI. My boss told us that it's going to become a disciplinary issue if we continue writing our own code instead of using AI to do it. Unbelievable.

At the same time, we're expected to move fast, hit aggressive deadlines, and deliver everything perfectly. There's no real scoping process, things just get promised and we're expected to figure it out after the fact. When we do get asked for scoping input, our feedback is completely ignored. If I say it takes 20 hours to do, he will notify the client it's 10 hours under contract and then tell us to "figure it out".

So it's not just normal development work anymore. It's juggling multiple unrelated responsibilities, under tight deadlines, while also being told we can't actually write our own code.

The result is exactly what you'd expect. Our code is inconsistent, hard to follow, and a pain to debug. Even small issues take way longer than they should because no one fully understands what was generated or how it's structured.

I'm not against using AI as a tool, we've been doing that for a while. But forcing it as the only way to write code, based on something heard on a podcast, while also expecting speed, quality, and constant output across multiple projects, has made everything slower, more chaotic, and way more frustrating than it needs to be.

And yes, I'm absolutely looking for a new job. This job market is just awful right now.