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Ha, I send corrections (including minor grammar/spelling) to ICs under me. But I use it explicitly as a "teaching moment", and explain to them: * They should

Ha, I send corrections (including minor grammar/spelling) to ICs under me. But I use it explicitly as a "teaching moment", and explain to them: * They should be mindful of all aspects of their work, including docs. * If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality. * I warn them that when /others/ in the company see our code and docs, if we look sloppy, they will implicitly form a judgement of us as a sloppy team. On the other hand, if the single contribution I ever provided for my team was spell-check... then yeah, I should leave.

throwanem 5y ago
> If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality. This is a tooling problem, not a people problem. There's not a language I know that doesn't have at least a tolerably decent formatter and linter out there, and a delightful side benefit of having those in your build chain is the end of style bikeshedding. I find "well, if it means that much to you, you can always open a PR on the style rules," and the knowledge that they'll need to justify their preference - and own all the whitespace PRs, and at least half the merge conflicts, if they wish not to be thought a jerk - quells most folks' desire to fight about their preferred number of spaces or what-have-you. Without any sort of reliable tooling support for a standard house style, I believe I might well come to regard the kind of insistence you describe as a demand to waste time on pointless busywork. Doubly so, if the person doing the insisting had made no evident effort to find and put into practice such tooling support.

throwanem 5y ago

> If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality. This is a tooling problem, not a people problem. There's not a language I know that doesn't have at least a tolerably decent formatter and linter out there, and a delightful side benefit of having those in your build chain is the end of style bikeshedding. I find "well, if it means that much to you, you can always open a PR on the style rules," and the knowledge that they'll need to justify their preference - and own all the whitespace PRs, and at least half the merge conflicts, if they wish not to be thought a jerk - quells most folks' desire to fight about their preferred number of spaces or what-have-you. Without any sort of reliable tooling support for a standard house style, I believe I might well come to regard the kind of insistence you describe as a demand to waste time on pointless busywork. Doubly so, if the person doing the insisting had made no evident effort to find and put into practice such tooling support.