If you have an overeager junior that went off and spent a week resolving a task that wasn’t prioritized and wasn’t what they were supposed to be working on, I t

If you have an overeager junior that went off and spent a week resolving a task that wasn’t prioritized and wasn’t what they were supposed to be working on, I think you could rightly take them aside and tell them “we’ll have to table this for now and come back to it later. Right now we’re prioritizing X and can’t be spending time on…”. Being a professional is partly about learning how to dissociate yourself from your work, and to realize 99% of the time, your teammates aren’t trying to sabotage you for some nefarious scheme. We’ve all worked on projects for months that eventually got canned. We’ve all gotten rough comments in a code review. It’s up to you as a professional to take those things in stride and learn from it rather than letting that stuff destroy your morale. And of course, the people who are blunt and rude will also have to learn that being blunt and rude ruins many relationships. But we’re all professionals here, not artists. If a junior civil engineer was building a bridge and ended up designing it with structural defects, and the senior engineer came up to him and said “I’m sorry we’re just going to have to redo all this because it’s unsalvageable at this point”. The senior is perfectly fine in this case! I don’t want to drive on shoddy bridges built to protect a juniors ego. Edit: I also think a lot of the comments responding talking about how toxic the maintainer is may not have much experience maintaining a large open source project. I’ve had contributors for some of my OSS projects, and accepting a PR from a random person is a lot of work. Often, it’s more work than doing it yourself. The amount of time needed to carefully review the code, communicate with the contributor to fix issues, make sure the code is upholding the expected quality and expectations is immense. At a job, a junior has already been vetted through an interview process. It’s not some random stranger requesting a change. There’s way more factors here than many of the dissenters here seem to be taking into account. And getting a PR rejected does suck. But having been on both sides I understand both sides. It’s a difficult situation and it’s hard to resolve these things without upsetting someone unintentionally. (Based on the maintainers communication, it doesn’t seem like they were being particularly nasty or rude).