In Poland, some devs say: I haven’t become a software engineer to talk with people. We, programmers, sometimes like to be perceived as incomprehensible, Heraclitean savants, who stand above the masses of ordinary users. Some of us, look down on junior developers. The internet is full of such memes, showing how dumb junior developers are, compared to legendary seniors.
When we show an old technology to a junior developer
Source: https://thecodinglove.com/when-we-show-an-old-technology-to-a-junior-developer
Among us, developers, there’s a constant battle. The ongoing domination struggle. How many times have I seen refactoring a source code to the shorter version, using unpopular language features just to show off how great our knowledge is… As well as reduced estimations, to prove we’re more efficient. And people starting recruitment processes just for the sake of training. Last but not least – assigning not easy but mundane tasks to junior developers.
In one company I worked for I had a colleague, let’s call him Peter. Peter was a junior developer like me. One day, however, probably due to longer experience, he has been promoted to a regular developer. Two weeks later, when I was working with the source code, I asked my colleagues at the open-space about decimal type in C# which I didn’t know at that time. Peter immediately stopped working and laughed out loudly.
– You do NOT know the decimal!? You’re such a junior dev! – he said
Then some senior developer heard it and laughed out even louder.
– Peter, how dare you to laugh? You asked me the same question one month ago!
Meanwhile, it is cooperation and synergy, not ego and knowledge about esoteric technology features, which creates productive teams that create beautiful, well designed, effective solutions to business problems and make clients happy. After years spent on software development, I’ve understood one thing…
The most important quality of a software engineer is empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If a developer can see the world through the eyes of other people, he’ll be able to create software easy and comfortable for ordinary people. If he can think outside of his perspective he’ll be able to write the source code understandable for others. Therefore modifying it will be easier and cheaper. Having empathy, the developer will be able to communicate with the business.
As developers, we should always try to improve our empathy. We should ask ourselves as often as possible – will that be understandable for others, who don’t know what I know? Won’t it be overly complex, will it be easy to use? Do I use the language simple enough?
When we recruit developers we should carefully look at their personality. Self-contained, tyrannical people, even if technically brilliant, can create more problems than they solve. I’d recommend to not focus solely on IQ and technical skills. Most of the projects don’t have as monumental technical challenges as we imagine.
Technologies inevitably fade away and disappear. What will be left is the source code. It’s going to be source code written by the people who were able to understand that someone will come after them and that person will need to understand their work, that this person will probably not have deep knowledge about framework and the programming language, and maybe won’t have as deep domain knowledge as they have. Or it’s going to be written by people who don’t care about their successors but themselves rather. Nobody would like to maintain the source code created by the latter. It will be a hell to recruit people and their work will be slow and ineffective. We don’t want it. Therefore – focus on empathy.