Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

When I was a junior engineer a long time ago. I wrote a change that someone approved, and merged.

A few weeks later a senior engineer saw the code in passing, proceeded to rewrite all of it, submitted a PR with a 2 page description tearing into the original code. Explaining why it was terrible and unacceptable and then posted the PR into our it into our team's slack channel with some comment like:

"@here everyone please read this PR as an example of terrible engineering"

The code was indeed quite poor, and the lessons were valuable, and I took them to heart. I also spent the next 18 months actively avoiding requesting feedback, in fear of this happening again.

I think as a senior, this kind of behavior tends to really leave a lasting impact on starry eyed juniors.

Something to keep in mind.

I once tried to do regular postings of 'funny bits of code' in the slack at my company. It was mostly meant to be in jest, but also had the side aim of trying to get the team to aim higher.

The first few editions were snippets of my own code. I got a few token lols from other devs.

I then saw a senior had committed what looked like a gem... something obviously contorted but fairly short and understandable for if they were coding on autopiliot

`if day.isWeekday() && !day.isWeekend() && day.isMonday() { // this is a monday`

The day I posted that to slack was the day I learned never to criticize in public, even non-personally and even in jest.

Sounds like an incredibly toxic work culture. A manager should have stepped in to shut that senior engineer down once that got posted to Slack.

If someone did this on my team, I'd publicly tear into them if I wasn't their manager for being not just unprofessional, but cruel.

If I was their manager, they'd be forced to apologize for how it was handled to the person with myself and HR on the call, and then I'd force them to read a productive feedback book.

I'd also expect they quit. I usually find people overly cruel at work are especially insecure and in need of counseling. Usually something else driving that behaviour. Most people aren't just assholes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com