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I would take the opposite approach. Treat the person as a senior and leave them by and let them ask you for help. Then give them bit sized advise on how you w

by ipaddr 3y ago

I would take the opposite approach. Treat the person as a senior and leave them by and let them ask you for help. Then give them bit sized advise on how you would do it and maybe throw in others do this or that but it's up to you. Don't pair or do programming work for them. Make them figure it out. They need to get frustrated and figure it out or ask you. Empower the developer. Him explaining ideas to others is how many people learn. Let him teach his peers. Juniors write horrible code. Lucky you are not in a code judging contest. What matters is does it run and does it meet your departments guidelines in terms of coding rules / style. If not don't pass the code review until changes are made. I think you are providing good knowledge but not giving the person time/space to grow into the role.

NicoJuicy 3y ago
> Treat the person as a senior and leave them by and let them ask you for help. Then give them bit sized advise on how you would do it and maybe throw in others do this or that but it's up to you. That's actually what I did the first month, since we were on holidays in December ( I always replied and tried to follow up). I carefully explained the complete context of the feature. Context of this was abstracting away the Azure Cognitive Search specific filter queries in caller applications ( yuk :p ). Showed a dev branch where the rough work was done on 1 webapp ( it needed more work to verify the filters by entity and create pr's per entity), which creates a new route. And then a pr with a feature flag in the caller webapp to call the new route with a feature flag, for the caller web apps. He just couldn't do and I was flabbergasted tbh. On multiple occasions he literally said he was stuck, while they're were multiple pr's already completed by me with an almost exact pr ( the same changes but in different webapps ). One time, he was stuck to call the new endpoint that was generated, since it had other arguments. Another time, I gave him advise to check assemblyRedirect to fix an issue. I had 3 feedback loop calls with him about this in particular and he couldn't understand assemblyRedirect's syntax. At the end, I just did it on my own in a pair programming session and explained the 2 solutions I found. Which was also what he requested, => "can you fix it for me".
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Note: this is about the current mentorship onboarding a senior. The one I mentioned in the op were previous examples in the last years to see if there's an overlap, since I'm already reflecting over the current situation with similar situations from the past.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  This person clearly isn't a senior. Either he should do it already or he should have realized his limits and asked for specific things he needed to accomplish his work (juniors often don't know what they need). Or he's in a difficult personal situation and can't think clearly (not sure this is your job to figure out though). I agree with other commenters: in the end you hired a senior so you wouldn't have to spend time teaching a junior. Be available to explain things he asks but give him time and space to figure out things on his own. Is it the very first month of employment? Maybe the onboarding wasn't great and he is bogged down trying to understand the big picture. You shouldn't be hand holding seniors with experience. Give him concrete goals, requirements and deadlines so he knows what he needs to deliver and let him do his thing. Also, review your hiring process.

by ipaddr 3y ago

NicoJuicy 3y ago

> Treat the person as a senior and leave them by and let them ask you for help. Then give them bit sized advise on how you would do it and maybe throw in others do this or that but it's up to you. That's actually what I did the first month, since we were on holidays in December ( I always replied and tried to follow up). I carefully explained the complete context of the feature. Context of this was abstracting away the Azure Cognitive Search specific filter queries in caller applications ( yuk :p ). Showed a dev branch where the rough work was done on 1 webapp ( it needed more work to verify the filters by entity and create pr's per entity), which creates a new route. And then a pr with a feature flag in the caller webapp to call the new route with a feature flag, for the caller web apps. He just couldn't do and I was flabbergasted tbh. On multiple occasions he literally said he was stuck, while they're were multiple pr's already completed by me with an almost exact pr ( the same changes but in different webapps ). One time, he was stuck to call the new endpoint that was generated, since it had other arguments. Another time, I gave him advise to check assemblyRedirect to fix an issue. I had 3 feedback loop calls with him about this in particular and he couldn't understand assemblyRedirect's syntax. At the end, I just did it on my own in a pair programming session and explained the 2 solutions I found. Which was also what he requested, => "can you fix it for me".

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Note: this is about the current mentorship onboarding a senior. The one I mentioned in the op were previous examples in the last years to see if there's an overlap, since I'm already reflecting over the current situation with similar situations from the past.
gtirloni 3y ago
This person clearly isn't a senior. Either he should do it already or he should have realized his limits and asked for specific things he needed to accomplish his work (juniors often don't know what they need). Or he's in a difficult personal situation and can't think clearly (not sure this is your job to figure out though). I agree with other commenters: in the end you hired a senior so you wouldn't have to spend time teaching a junior. Be available to explain things he asks but give him time and space to figure out things on his own. Is it the very first month of employment? Maybe the onboarding wasn't great and he is bogged down trying to understand the big picture. You shouldn't be hand holding seniors with experience. Give him concrete goals, requirements and deadlines so he knows what he needs to deliver and let him do his thing. Also, review your hiring process.