5 ms·

> but if the junior or medior doesn't understand matrices, nothing I do will make them understand them. What if you took a hour or a day to help educate an eag

> but if the junior or medior doesn't understand matrices, nothing I do will make them understand them. What if you took a hour or a day to help educate an eager junior developer about what you did in that PR? I, personally, don't know matrices. I can damn well learn them if it becomes relevant to me. If we were on the same team, and I said "what's this stuff?" and you said "nothing I can do will make you understand this" I'd be pissed, and that attitude would _permanently sour_ the relationship. I imagine there was a point in time that _you_ did not understand matrices. I've no doubt that matrices can be tricky, difficult to understand, etc. So, lets work together on sharing that knowledge! Once you've helped me learn it (pointing me to resources, pairing with me on an example problem solving session involving matrices) I will be able to maintain the code, understand it, and apply the pattern to novel problems. But not just that, because I am a compulsive documenter of what I've learned, as you teach me, you help me teach _everyone who comes behind me_ TL;DR the attitude of "if jr/med devs don't already understand matrices, nothing I do will make them understand them." is _extremely_ self-limiting, locking you out of tons of potential value, and causing your entire team to be worse off. It's not your fault, per se. I know this attitude is common in the industry. It just really pisses me off, because so many teams are deeply damaged by it. (I know, I know. Maybe you'd love to slow down and teach early-career devs, but the feature death-slog required by management precludes you taking that time... in that case this isn't directly your fault, etc.)

gmfawcett 6y ago
In defense of the seniors... It generally takes people several semesters of Linear Algebra to become competent with "matrix stuff." It's unrealistic to expect every senior dev to also be an expert teacher -- never mind expecting them to know what the latest and best learning resources are (for a subject they may have learned, themselves, before the Web was invented). Sometimes the right and fair substitute for "nothing I can do will help you" is "get yourself a proper education on this subject, somehow, and then we can talk about the code."
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  I think the issue is that many of us are poor communicators (myself being number 1) so we say nothing I can do will help you instead of I can't teach linear algebra, numerical analysis and do the code review in an hour. Therefore putting a junior engineer who has a weak math background on a code review for my new algorithm which uses spectral sparsification for approximating matrix inverses in n log(n) isn't a good idea.
  - aequitas 6y ago
    But a junior can still ask question like: "why isn't there a test for this code", "why are the business logic and algorithm code mixed together" or "why doesn't this align with the design documentation we wrote last week, does it need updating?".
    - peterwoerner 6y ago
      And the junior will learn which things to learn. I certainly think you should allow juniors to code review senior coders work if for nothing more than mentoring, but I am sensitive as to why an overloaded senior would balk at the idea.
Cd00d 6y ago
Wildly off-topic, but I recently learned this. Use asterisks in HN to express emphasis* in italics*. I too used underscores (a la Slack) up until a couple weeks ago when I noticed a comment from Dang somewhere saying how to emphasize.
- wonder_er 6y ago
  aaaah thank you! I often mis-apply slack/markdown formatting. Instead, now I will less often mis-apply markdown formatting to hacker news. Thank you! And this isn't "wildly off-topic", by the way. This is "extremely germane to what I said, but addresses something other than the specific point I was trying to say." Doesn't make it not helpful. In fact, I bet there are many situations where this kind of feedback is more (I almost wrongly-formatted that!) helpful than addressing the comment directly. You, dear internet stranger, have taught me something. Thank you!

gmfawcett 6y ago

In defense of the seniors... It generally takes people several semesters of Linear Algebra to become competent with "matrix stuff." It's unrealistic to expect every senior dev to also be an expert teacher -- never mind expecting them to know what the latest and best learning resources are (for a subject they may have learned, themselves, before the Web was invented). Sometimes the right and fair substitute for "nothing I can do will help you" is "get yourself a proper education on this subject, somehow, and then we can talk about the code."

peterwoerner 6y ago
I think the issue is that many of us are poor communicators (myself being number 1) so we say nothing I can do will help you instead of I can't teach linear algebra, numerical analysis and do the code review in an hour. Therefore putting a junior engineer who has a weak math background on a code review for my new algorithm which uses spectral sparsification for approximating matrix inverses in n log(n) isn't a good idea.
- aequitas 6y ago
  But a junior can still ask question like: "why isn't there a test for this code", "why are the business logic and algorithm code mixed together" or "why doesn't this align with the design documentation we wrote last week, does it need updating?".
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    And the junior will learn which things to learn. I certainly think you should allow juniors to code review senior coders work if for nothing more than mentoring, but I am sensitive as to why an overloaded senior would balk at the idea.

Cd00d 6y ago

Wildly off-topic, but I recently learned this. Use asterisks in HN to express emphasis* in italics*. I too used underscores (a la Slack) up until a couple weeks ago when I noticed a comment from Dang somewhere saying how to emphasize.

wonder_er 6y ago
aaaah thank you! I often mis-apply slack/markdown formatting. Instead, now I will less often mis-apply markdown formatting to hacker news. Thank you! And this isn't "wildly off-topic", by the way. This is "extremely germane to what I said, but addresses something other than the specific point I was trying to say." Doesn't make it not helpful. In fact, I bet there are many situations where this kind of feedback is more (I almost wrongly-formatted that!) helpful than addressing the comment directly. You, dear internet stranger, have taught me something. Thank you!