News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by opmelogy on Friday August 19, 2022 @10:49AM (#32521691)
> Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design.

This approach probably works out because you have senior engineers laying out a lot of the core structure and architecture for how things built. There's a tendency for newer people to tacitly adopt patterns that already exist and replicate.

However, this approach can be really problematic when you have a team that's primarily newer engineers. I've seen it multiple times and it's always the same result - productivity almost grinds to a halt over time because there are so many problems in the code base. The worst example I saw was switching teams and seeing the team velocity. We measured all the work in story points and used the exact same task as a baseline story point. The previous team with mostly senior engineers, a point took .5 days. With the new team that was started by all fresh grad engineers, a story point took a minimum of 3 days and usually bumped up to 4 days. This velocity lasted multiple years, even when the team had a much more balanced spread of senior, mid-level, and fresh grad engineers.

Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by pca006132 on Friday August 19, 2022 @12:00PM (#32522663)
Are you sure that the discussion should be around code quality but not architecture? I think they are quite different...
Re:What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad by P5fRxh5kUvp2th on Friday August 19, 2022 @04:50PM (#32525755)
In addition, I think it's the fault of management if it's all young engineers.

I've often said the difference between a senior and a junior isn't writing software successfully, it's writing software that's maintainable 5 years down the road. The only way to learn that skill is to deal with a project over years and learn the pain points that aren't immediately obvious w/i the first 18 months.