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I’ve been in this career as long as Kyle has and this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
First of all, creating new code is never done in a vacuum. New code will, without a doubt, interact with technical debt left over by other engineers. The problem Kyle is trying to address is a fucking hypothetical in a world full of real problems.
This hypothetical solution to a bullshit problem will have an adverse effect on people of color. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen that kind of gatekeeping bullshit the entirety of my career. Junior engineers get the legacy work and senior engineers get the green field shit.
What happens though is the senior engineers tend to have blind spots, because we all do, and they create a new thing with technical debt they don’t want to fix because they’ll just pass it on to junior engineers.
Junior engineers should not be sullied right out the gate with our fucking technical debt. It’s like a parent passing their trauma on to their children. Instead, let the junior engineers learn from their own mistakes.
If they want your opinion, they’ll probably ask for it. And the curious ones will ask a lot. Others will find your mistakes for themselves, even ones you’re not aware of.
The job of a senior engineer is to create other successful engineers. You do that by getting out of the way, you do that by raising others up. Training them with technical debt is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. That’s not their work, it’s yours. You wrote it.
I strive to let junior engineers take on the hardest green field work they feel comfortable taking on. And I plant myself as a support backup, nothing more, because that’s how servant leadership works. The last thing I want is credit.
If I can raise up 20 awesome senior engineers, then I’m doing my job. If all I can do is point junior engineers to all the places I took a shit in the code just so they can clean it up, then I deserve to be ridiculed and then fired. It doesn’t matter wtf my intent was.
