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Re:Middle managers fear they've become irrelevant with work ... by khazhoux on Saturday April 09, 2022 @09:12PM (#30973624)
Ha, I send corrections (including minor grammar/spelling) to ICs under me. But I use it explicitly as a "teaching moment", and explain to them:

* They should be mindful of all aspects of their work, including docs.

* If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality.

* I warn them that when /others/ in the company see our code and docs, if we look sloppy, they will implicitly form a judgement of us as a sloppy team.

On the other hand, if the single contribution I ever provided for my team was spell-check... then yeah, I should leave.

Re:Middle managers fear they've become irrelevant with work ... by throwanem on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @05:17PM (#31008331)
> If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality.

This is a tooling problem, not a people problem. There's not a language I know that doesn't have at least a tolerably decent formatter and linter out there, and a delightful side benefit of having those in your build chain is the end of style bikeshedding. I find "well, if it means that much to you, you can always open a PR on the style rules," and the knowledge that they'll need to justify their preference - and own all the whitespace PRs, and at least half the merge conflicts, if they wish not to be thought a jerk - quells most folks' desire to fight about their preferred number of spaces or what-have-you.

Without any sort of reliable tooling support for a standard house style, I believe I might well come to regard the kind of insistence you describe as a demand to waste time on pointless busywork. Doubly so, if the person doing the insisting had made no evident effort to find and put into practice such tooling support.