Comment by ratww | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ratww | Hacker News Reader

Honestly if a junior made a mistake that costed one month, there is some issue with the process and I REALLY hope they're not blaming you for it.

Also, unless the sprint duration is four weeks and there's no dailies, I really can't see a junior being able to delay anything by 1 month in ANY sane company. Unless you're preventing people from working, actively sabotaging things (and skipping code review processes!), I really struggle to see how a Junior Developer would be able to slow a team down like that. If this is happening, that's a huge red flag, and you're not in a good team/company. I really don't think you're the problem.

> When I first joined I struggled to even know how to start things.

That's how it is with new companies. I'm at this for 20 years and at some places it took me six months or more to unravel the massive amount of stupid code and processes before I was productive enough.

> The problem is at this point I have been on the team too long to ask any basic questions, one of the senior engineers even pointed out they shouldn't be helping me with certain processes at this point

I'm a team lead and I ask basic questions all the time. Sometimes to juniors or interns.

What kind of things we're talking about? Opening a PR? Simple programming questions? Opening up tickets in JIRA? This is basic. But deciphering convoluted code or navigating convoluted processes? Using an arcane shitty ticketing system? That's not really basic level anymore. But even if it were, that senior engineer was out of line...

PS: If you think we're being "nice" to you on the replies out of sympathy, it isn't. This is for real. HN is the kind of community that would call anyone on their bullshit.

For asking basic questions all the time, I still do this as a senior engineer. At large companies, this is due to tribal knowledge, and one of the best things that can be done to reduce tribal knowledge is to take notes and make some simple docs.

If you had to ask someone how to open tickets? Create a short doc or wiki with those instructions.

That's a good way for even a junior engineer to start producing value, for established teams they often have tribal knowledge without realizing it.

I like to think there's no such thing as "basic" questions. What does that even mean? If a question is "basic", then the answer must not be complex either, so what's wrong with asking a basic question? All people who I've worked with that were subpar usually tend to ask too little questions, not too many.

Also you'd be surprised how often basic questions actually are not basic at all, when instead people are all assuming everyone knows the answer and are too far in to ask the question.

Yep, exactly!

I had to ask at our last planning "wait, what, where do add the red flag to JIRA tickets". Considering I'm the one who's been conducting meetings and co-managing JIRA, and the one who red flags most stuff, that was 100% a brain fart. Someone telling me "you shouldn't be asking basic questions" not as a joke wouldn't go well.

Unless you're asking the same question every single week, that's not a problem. I doubt that's the case since OP already said his problem is he asks too little.

> Honestly if a junior made a mistake that costed one month, there is some issue with the process and I REALLY hope they're not blaming you for it.

Ideally yes. But realistically no.

Ideally there would be management available and coaching on any junior SWE, or at least you'd hope so. Realistically he may be looking at the business end of a PIP.

Ideally there would be blameless post mortems. Realistically there's no such thing, if you fuck up bad enough you're going to be shown the door.

Ideally if you're a great software engineer you would be with a company for the life of the company. Realistically, the politics and toxicity of workplaces limit the career of any employee.

At the very least there should be two people to blame for the one-month delay problem, the person (junior) who suggested the bad change and the person (more senior) who approved it.

And of course the manager or whoever is replacing him. But as people have said I don't know how a junior could delay the project by a month in any sane company, isn't the code reviewed? Don't they have some kind of process for changes?

Yep. A junior delaying a project for a month sounds like a completely fucked up process.

That, or the junior taking WAY more responsibility than a normal junior and deserves a fantastic raise.

Nope. Realistically YES. I worked in some less than ideal places in my career, but even the ones I quit, this wouldn’t realistically happen.

A junior being able to delay a process for a month means gross incompetence from everyone else involved.

We as developers have the duty to push back against stupidity in the workplace. The labour market is in our favour, those companies should die.

So I've seen people be hired who were expected to perform poorly but then were fired when layoffs happened to protect the core workers -- because stack ranking and all that.

It's kind of like poker. The moral is: if you can't see the sucker they're going to fire next, it's probably you. Basically, don't be the sucker at any work environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com