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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Not as annoying as junior devs who refuse to take your advice

What I think in such cases is "unless I can convince him that this is a bad idea, then I should let him do it". Yes, I understand that sometimes we aren't entirely sure why a thing is bad, we just have a gut feeling that it would break something, or is a bad practice.

So first off I try to convince them with everything I got. That usually works if I have solid concrete reasons. If I don't and let them do it there way. Sometimes it turns out my instincts were right and I get to learn exactly what was right about them. Sometimes it turns out I was wrong and his way was much more efficient and I get to learn something new.

Either way, it doesn't make the junior dev feel I am imposing my will on him. People tend to work harder when they feel it was their idea.

When I was a junior dev (and some days I still feel like that), sometimes I needed to write a proof of concept to see why something wouldn't work. Luckily this kind of development (at least in the early stages of a project) was encouraged. I still throw together small scripts and apps to test ideas all the time (http://github.com/voltagex/junkcode)

I would assume most devs do the same all the time to benchmark technologies or approaches to problems.

(Then again I seem to meet far more devs who are telling me about using shiny new tech X and how amazing it is, than ones who actually tell me about how a specific tech solves their use case).

But about as annoying as senior devs who give bad advice or ignore half the words in your sentences and then give you bad advice, or who start giving you bad advice during a planning meeting after a 30 second brief about your problem that was directed to your manager.

subtle helpful nudge about that being the joke

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