Letter to a Junior Programmer

> You need to really understand and empathize with the user experience and see your hours invested from their perspective. “Wait, the engineer spent all day making the variables conform to the style guide? But the search bar isn’t working!”

This. I get terribly annoyed every time I see ugly code or user-unfriendly features that just barely work, all duly covered in (mostly perfunctory) unit tests. I can't help wondering how much better both could have been- the code and the actual delivered feature- had not the developer in charge wasted their time writing tests that never break in any case, save for that one time when you're trying to actually improve the mess.

Style guides and linters are the way developers who never think an inch beyond their keyboard assert their presence and importance to the rest of the team.