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Comment by abatilo | Hacker News Reader

Something about promising high quality production code while also emphasizing the growth of junior engineers feels inverted.

I love working with earlier career engineers but their code isn't known to always be very high quality. How does that work on GitStart?

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Yes it does feel inverted and rightfully so. Because of that, juniors are net-negative by default which surprises most teams when they hire junior devs for the first time.

We are not fully there yet, but you can see from the Open Source PRs above that its good enough that this can make an in-house team more productive than the default.

Biggest part that makes it work are enabling multiple devs to review each other, solid QA and dev environments to reduce hand-holding and a community to grow and learn from.

Larger corps like Google already have this infra setup, but most teams cant afford to build it internally.

Looking at some of the examples of closed PR's I'm seeing tests that meet the bare minimum but don't actually test features/components in a meaningful way. For example I saw one that checks if giving a value to the suffix or prefix prop will make that value appear in the DOM, but it doesn't actually test if the suffix comes after the main content.

It got merged so clearly the devs find value in the work but I wouldn't call that production ready.

I would guess they have their own senior engineers doing code review on the backend before the client sees the code

We used to for many years at the beginning, and over time started to try a few things to reduce it over time

We first got the more experienced junior on the repo review others. Later on, we started to enable multiple devs to work on the same PR initially, review each other and best one sent back

And with GitSlice, we have been able to take very large codebases and slice it to a smaller repo that is much easier for juniors to work on.

So now we get teachers and seniors to train juniors, but they are not in the loop of the PR execution anymore.

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