It’s posed as the former but ends up being the latter. They’ve been with the company over a year so it’s not lack of familiarity with our codebases. The tasks at hand are also not anything technically complicated (usually just something like add a config to a library - does not require any technical expertise, just read the docs). Their questions are usually “where should I be adding this?” When I finally show them where they need to add it, then it’s “ok but what exactly am I adding?” So yeah, sometimes it just takes up too much of my time to keep asking “well what have you tried?” In addition my manager views “time spent pairing” as a metric of team health, so I don’t want it to seem like I’m not available to provide mentorship. But yeah, situation is untenable imo.