theyAreMysterious

Intern mode activated: Redirecting to Senior… please hold.

Lol

Do y'all not let the juniors talk to clients? Half of what they (and anyone new to a project) are missing is why they're building what they're building.

Juniors that know what they're building and why save you and the client time and money while giving the client a better product. It also prepares them to be better devs once they're trusted with more.

If you create a junior who has the dev skills to be an intermediate but you can't trust them to lead the projects you expect from an intermediate then you either promote them and are dissatisfied with their performance, or you don't and they correctly realize they should leave and get an intermediate role somewhere else (hopefully with a company that lets them succeed).

You are of course supposed to teach juniors and interns to be better developers, but there are people who have the coding ability to be intermediates straight out of uni (though this is admittedly uncommon and typically an unreasonable expectation). But even these people won't have the right view of what they're building unless the idea that they should be asking that question is explicitly drilled into them as interns or juniors. After all, in uni you are told to build what you are building because it's the assignment you are being graded on.

Remember, there's a very good job available for bad devs with good product understanding: management.