Peer design reviews
I have a girl in my team who is aiming for a promotion and for that she has been assigned a low level design. She keeps coming to me or senior sde (a lot biased towards her) daily to review her design on white board without any documentation. How should I handle this situation? Isn't this too much of hand holding which might reflect in her feedback as well?
:(
What's the point of having coworkers if you can't spend ten minutes a day discussing your work and getting ideas and feedback?
While this is ideal, there are many cocky co-workers. Countless time i experienced this at Facebook, where your teammate spends like 15 mins for a discussion, but convey to manager spending an hour - just for matter of exaggeration or lack of proper time management (certainly in a tech-dive talk, I don’t expect my colleague to share about childcare expense when I didn’t even have a kid!)
The discussions often span more than 30 minutes which make me cranky and feels like I should do the design instead. I'm also not sure how to communicate this to my manager and get the review counted and recognized by my boss.
You are learning how design process work
If the entire reason for this is promotion, do not hand hold her and instead encourage to put it down on some doc on her own. Ask yourself, will the organization benefit by promoting her?
Being female is irrelevant here
"I have a girl on my team" Probably you have a woman on your team.
Her being female seems irrelevant. As a more experienced SDE you should be developing the best. Help her with the design without handholding. Discuss trade offs, alternatives, complexity, scalability, etc. White boarding and design discussions are a core part of SDE3 role and higher. It means people in your org respect you for your tech insight and it’s a great way to demonstrate influence.
Understood your view point, even I'm of the opinion that white boarding is better than asking peer to create diagrams everytime. However, I also want to ensure that my peers can work independently and gain confidence to operate at next level and the tough part is where to draw the line of discussion. Thanks for the advise
Hire and develop the best doesn’t mean promoting people before they’re ready.
OP, mentioning female and posting this in women in tech shows that you’re already biased and will not be supporting her promotion. Give her this feedback now rather in promotion feedback. She might be thinking this is normal process as nobody mentioned anything. Mentor and guide her to achieve goals.
Software is a team sport and people have different ways of executing on an assignment. Some need to sit in a room alone while others need to leverage others. I think she can be measured at the end by her execution rather too much in how she got there.
It’s a team sport, but if she’s weak at design and relies on others to do the designs for her under the guise of “getting feedback”, then she’s just an entry-level implementer. She’s not ready to be promoted and to lead projects on her own.