Condescending keyboard warriors
Does anyone else here have a feeling that sometimes the senior engineers on your team leave condescending code review comments in your PRs? (Feels like I should probably call em "keyboard warriors", given that they speak quite good, in person). Happens especially if you are a low-level engineer and/or a newbie to the team. Infact, sometimes even about 2-3 months into a new team, when you know certain stuff but yet you feel like you are dictated to. There have been times where I wanted to say "Stop telling me this generic stuff to do, its so basic and I know it", but never did cos I didn't want to be that "mildly-aggressive" coworker. P.S : I do try to prove my worth and knowledge, in other ways then and there. But looks like they built an image of mine, when I was a new person in the team n they are un-willing to change. I'm not saying I don't need their help at all but how do I tell them I'm not the same amateur person that they think I am, anymore?
Why would they keep telling you basic generic stuff that you already know? One would guess it's because you don't do it anyway and you're pissed about getting called out on your obvious fuck ups. Or maybe they're power tripping dicks. Either way, write great code and grow a thicker skin.
The way to tackle this is to have a team level code guideline. If someone still tries to project their personal pref as a cr comment, you can just point them to the guideline.
guideline can easily become a tool for unreasonable people to dictate their pet views on others, be careful with them
Code reviews are primarily for code health of the project. If you wrote something sloppy, even if you know better and everyone knows you know better, it still needs to be called out so it doesn't make it into your codebase. Don't take these things personal, just learn and execute better next time.
I couldn’t agree more! And other encouraging comments like these, that hint towards the same. My fear is that if someday when I take up a complex work, he/she would go behind my back and say “I think XYZ is not qualified enough for handling this. And it is evident from the PRs where I had to pretty much dictate everything to him/her”. And he/she actually has a solid evidence in this case. Well, probably I’m as bad as he fears, in his opinion. But I don’t want to be ripped off a chance. How else would one grow?
Keep executing better every time.
I do many code reviews at the senior level. It’s important for you to learn how to be open to criticism. Experienced coders know you will get better by tending to even the smallest detail about their work. You don’t have to like your co-workers who review your code, but it I good to respect them.
Feedback is a gift
They keep telling u that because u never addressed their comments! Take their feedback! Main problem with current trend of juniors is study masters, trash talk c++, Java or any strongly typed language, wanted to quickly ship something to prod without any cross team collaboration and bad code quality but show heroism with quickness and get appreciation from leadership!
For someone who doesn’t know the entire story or the specifics of it, that was some solid judgemental remark. And also nice work with the stereotyping about the “current trend of juniors” 👏 Not sure about who you have personally encountered that made you say so about the entire set of “juniors”, but I don’t think that’s true.
Examples?
1. Asking to run so n so test, before pushing to prod. Despite the fact it’s a known & basic pre-condition. Feels like they pass comments just because they have to. 2. Pushing their own styles of coding onto others. This I agree most smart senior engineers understand there need to be styling differences amongst the team members n as long as the quality is impacted, they are good. But there are a few others who’d always want things to work only in their way. But as someone else mentioned here, one might have to just grow a thick skin n endure it with patience
Ahhh now it makes sense. This which you describe sounds very much like Salesforce. I worked there for a period of time and quit over this. You’re learning a lot about how to deal with crappy people. And so I say you have to get comfortable with criticism - and part of that is learning how to deal with prima donnas.
Even after you become a senior engineer, other strongly opinionated people will continue to disagree with you over language wars, style crusades, and design decisions. Look at how Linus Torvalds argues with (highly experienced) Linux developers. Don't fight keyboard warriors. Just give up.