A senior should not a act as a senior in front of a junior developer

When I was at the very beginning of my career I had some experiences that determined me to describe them. I met some people that had something like 3–5 years experience. I had none back then. Whenever I needed them, they didn’t have time to help me and I could totally understand that.

However, in those moments when I was writing code, in the best way that I could at that point in time, out of nowhere, a colleague pop up saying “You’re doing it wrong! You need to follow the Uncle’s Bob code standards. Besides, you are using ADO.NET which couples you to the database, you need to inject your DAL.”

And I was like … “Hmmm … okay”. What was the point of that comment? He threw some buzzwords that made no sense whatsoever to me. When I tried to understand what he meant he didn’t help me. He started laughing “hahaha” saying that I’m so “junior” — so the final outcome was just an unnecessary interruption for me. And I was very surprised that he, as a “senior” developer didn’t know about the true costs of interruptions.

This is just a similar situation presented in on one of my previous articles.

Conclusion

The example above was quite frequent, therefore I wanted to write this article hopefully people will understand why a junior programmer isn’t able to write good code from his first months in the field. It’s purely logical. If someone wants to help him, then it takes a lot more than just some trolling criticism.

If someone who has several years of experience in the field would like to help a fresher the first he needs to put himself in the junior’s shoes. If her really wants to help, then he should take it easy because someone (quite) inexperienced will not know the best practices and tools to develop software. Don’t pretend to help as shown in the image bellow!

Disclaimer: Not all seniors are behaving like the one in the example above, I’m sure there are people out there that are really want to help others. There you go …