The most valuable thing I got out of my first job was that I was being mentored by a senior guy - something I feel like will never come my way again unless someone is willing to mentor a doofus in his thirties with ten years of experience. He wasn't a modern "senior" engineer who has five years of experience either. He had about 30+ years of experience under his belt. It was really helpful to have someone there to guide me in research and to discuss things at length when I was stuck. I would much rather take a positive mentorship than have an education budget that I can spend how I wish. "Make sure you clear it with HR first haha."

From my observation it is becoming more and more uncommon to get mentored at a job or even be able to discuss topics at length, but this may be my ignorant perception now as a fully remote worker. I haven't heard first hand from anyone about being mentored, and only have seen it mentioned rarely on a job description.

Another thing I've noticed is how managers don't want to "waste" resources on similar methods of knowledge sharing, like pair programming or shadowing. "Jump right in and ask for help if you're stuck!"

It seems the industry is only concerned with hiring "self-starters" and people who can grind without guidance, instead of properly on-boarding and mentoring a person to fit in with the team and actually be successful and useful. The companies seem to be focused only on finding these "10X-ers" who won't question anything and can just churn out heaps of SLOC.

I don't think this is only a problem with junior devs. Why can't a thirty year old doofus like me get mentored too? Is that just called "going back to get a master's degree"? That does sound like an option, along with paid mentorships that some Github celebrities offer.

One alternative is to find an open source project that is accepting contributions, preferably one that you use and want to give back to. Start putting up pull-requests on this project and give the maintainers a chance to review them. There is a good chance that you will be provided a lot of helpful feedback and guidance, perhaps even higher quality than someone at work will give you. This has been beneficial to me, especially when the maintainer is highly skilled and generous with his time.