There are folks who are junior in their attitude and experience, but not in their coding or design skill set. I’m very senior, yet I’d say I suck at reviewing c

There are folks who are junior in their attitude and experience, but not in their coding or design skill set. I’m very senior, yet I’d say I suck at reviewing code. There are other things I’m good at, code reviews just aren’t one of those things. My best code reviewer on the team is a dude who’s just out of school. In fact, he’s probably the second best reviewer I’ve seen in 20 years in this industry, and the other dude is only better than him because he had incredibly deep knowledge of a gnarly problem domain specific to that particular team. Frankly, I’m shocked that someone who’s 22 years old can be this good, and I no longer believe there’s that huge of a gap in technical skill between junior and senior folks per se. I also think that people of such extreme skill should be paid at the same rate as the senior people even though they do not possess an illustrious resume quite yet. It pains me to see that he could be easily making three times as much if he only had “worked on such and such bullshit products for 10 years” on his resume. If I ever poach him, I’ll make sure he gets paid really well. The main point is, just because someone is nominally “junior” means little to nothing in terms of their ability to write and review code. The advantage of experience is largely in knowing how to restrict the search space when solving any given problem.