It depends on the context. Just yesterday I was doing a data centre audit with a colleague, who is many years my junior, and I am her manager, and she has hardly been in a data centre. She’s also amazing by the way.

So when I see her doing a few things that I wouldn’t have done, I could have just reacted and pointed it out and told her how it should be done. For sure I wanted to, I’m an engineer!

Or I can have a bit of trust that, given a minute and a few more repetitions, she’ll get it. Which she did. And now she’s learned something, and now I’m not “that guy”, and now we have a better relationship, and so on.

I appreciate that this might not be the sort of thing you had in mind. If there’s an error in code that isn’t going away if someone doesn’t say something then, sure, say something.