this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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I know it's a joke, but I do not enjoy being in the position with the stick.
Like, man, they'll sometimes check in some stupid stuff. Yesterday, I told two juniors to implement a unit test and they could use annotations like on another unit test, which I also explained.
Problem is, I had introduced that unit test a week ago and had given it an ignored-annotation, to document that that's currently broken.
And you guessed it, they copied that ignored-annotation, too, complete with the comment "//TODO currently broken". The test they implemented was not run, not even once.
And like, what the fuck do I do with that? Sure enough, it was a miscommunication, I'll try to be clearer next time.
But I'd also really like to explain to them whatever information they were missing, if they were missing any. Like, did they not know what the ignored-annotation does? Did they not think at all and just verbatim copied everything?
And then the problem is, this is kind of so dumb, that even just bringing it up is going to be embarassing for them. It's already me beating them with a stick.
I'd much rather praise them when they do something well, but this is so hard to spot when just reading over committed code. All the obstacles they cleared are not visible in there.
Junior dev here, this is the kind of stuff that is supposed to prompt you to ask questions. Literally one slack message when you see it, and give it a few hours for whenever you have time to see it and respond. I know it's annoying messaging y'all with stuff but... C'mon you gotta do it sometimes, especially if it's something you can reasonably predict will come up in review or is a simple question that doesn't require a lot of time to answer.
Yeah, we had a hard bottleneck for seniors, so they kind of got told to walk on their own as much as they can, but after just two weeks or so, I had to push hard against that, because they would frequently walk into wrong directions and then rectifying that would cost me significantly more time. At one point, I had to review a story three times, because they misunderstood the goal twice.
Similarly, we had a student, who would run off doing things for two weeks, and then suddenly she'd come up to you and tell you that she did this and this and that and now she's stuck.
And then if the second 'this' was an incorrect decision, you have to sit down with her in that exact moment and redo a lot of her work to get everything back on track.
So, yeah, juniors who know when to ask questions are extremely helpful. Otherwise I have to poll them for questions, which takes up time, too.