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> Read the commit history You're assuming there's always 'commit history' to review :) I completely agree you need to do investigation, and document what you

> Read the commit history You're assuming there's always 'commit history' to review :) I completely agree you need to do investigation, and document what you can about the system. Some of that documentation will take the form of tests. Without a doubt. The 'assumption' I refer to is either clients or other devs assuming something is correct. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard "it was working fine until 2 days ago", when, in fact, it was never actually working, just not throwing a visible error until 2 days ago. I will look at the fence - have seen reference to it before. "until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." - you may also need to realize the original rationale may never quite be understood. I've hit this a few times, and we've ended up just scrapping a particular set of functionality because no one could actually tell why it was there any more - everyone involved who may have used it or wanted/needed it is gone, and it's useless (or is now a blocker for other progress).

geodel 7y ago
I think you are making some great points here. I have seen code commits are mostly right click in Eclipse and commit all modified files irrespective of if they are local config changes or preferences. The senior devs in projects I worked have made 10 level deep 'strategy patterns' for future enhancements which still had hardcoded values underneath and absolutely non-extensible. So in my books senior developers knew what they were doing comes with huge assumption. I have noticed many sr engineers simply had delusions of grandeur far beyond their programing skills.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  Exactly. > So in my books senior developers knew what they were doing comes with huge assumption. This is another big assumption, and... especially given that we know in our industry that 'title inflation' is a real thing... "sr" just doesn't seem to mean much. I'm seeing lots of job postings today that call for "sr foo engineer", calling for 3+ years of experience. My definition and expectations of 'sr' are far different. Interestingly, I've only been in a couple of places that even defined what they actually meant by that title - what was expected was written down. It was still open to interpretation, but a baseline to judge you against, and to give jr folks something to shoot for. > which still had hardcoded values underneath and absolutely non-extensible. Don't even get me started on people that just learned the 'final' keyword and abuse the hell out of it. :)

geodel 7y ago

I think you are making some great points here. I have seen code commits are mostly right click in Eclipse and commit all modified files irrespective of if they are local config changes or preferences. The senior devs in projects I worked have made 10 level deep 'strategy patterns' for future enhancements which still had hardcoded values underneath and absolutely non-extensible. So in my books senior developers knew what they were doing comes with huge assumption. I have noticed many sr engineers simply had delusions of grandeur far beyond their programing skills.

mgkimsal 7y ago
Exactly. > So in my books senior developers knew what they were doing comes with huge assumption. This is another big assumption, and... especially given that we know in our industry that 'title inflation' is a real thing... "sr" just doesn't seem to mean much. I'm seeing lots of job postings today that call for "sr foo engineer", calling for 3+ years of experience. My definition and expectations of 'sr' are far different. Interestingly, I've only been in a couple of places that even defined what they actually meant by that title - what was expected was written down. It was still open to interpretation, but a baseline to judge you against, and to give jr folks something to shoot for. > which still had hardcoded values underneath and absolutely non-extensible. Don't even get me started on people that just learned the 'final' keyword and abuse the hell out of it. :)