“It’s my turn with the stick now, right? Right?”
We have two sticks and a rock for the whole platoon.
Now you have all right to motivate your mate fixing their code. HF with the stick!
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.This is still a good practice to find out who is actually working and who is thinking Zero-effort copy&paste will do.
Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.
OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).
Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.
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.
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.
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.
This is SO true and exactly why code reviews always feel like a beat down (even when they’re not). There’s no visibility into the truly good work that’s already been done.
Sometimes it takes a little unintentional embarrassment to drive a point home. It’ll make them think twice next time.
What I mean by that is that as long as you’re not intentionally or maliciously trying to embarrass them, then you shouldn’t feel bad. You cannot always control how somebody receives information; nor should you. The best you can do is to be clear and polite in your communication. If someone’s feelings get hurt, that’s on them to reconcile, not you.
This is genuinely like parenting a child: they need to develop their critical thinking skills, and to gain their own confidence. So they must be left to make their own mistakes to learn from. Your job is to give show them the tools to use, give advice when necessary, and be there to catch them when they fall; because they will fall.
Doing this will help bolster their self-confidence and make them better mid-/senior-developers later in their career. Coddling them and constantly holding their hand will make them reliant on other people and prevent them from learning anything.
Edit: also remember KISS. 😊
//TODO: Make this betterAnd you never look at it or touch it again.
There, code fixed!
