3 ms·
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
by 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 agoI 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 agoBut 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 agoAnd 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.