I see where you're coming from, but in context I don't think the author was advocating for treating junior devs badly on purpose. More like everyone ends up ban

I see where you're coming from, but in context I don't think the author was advocating for treating junior devs badly on purpose. More like everyone ends up banging their head against the wall sometimes as a developer, and you should be prepared for that if you're a new programmer and considering doing it as a career. In some sense it is paying dues but it's not imposed by anyone else, it's just that the less experienced you are the more often you get stuck. His related advice actually really resonated with me, basically just to be humble. "However with one or maybe two of the students I sensed overbearing confidence that now that could write some code and create prototypes they were valuable commodities in the industry." I've also come across this kind of person who's sure they can do no wrong, and there's no one worse to bring into an organization. Anybody that's gonna come in and do things their own way, not bothering to spend time learning how the team and codebase works and why, will cause a lot of friction. But when it's a junior dev it can be a lot more destructive because "their own way" will often be flat out bad as opposed to just incongruent with the way the rest of the team works.