> but it feels like my real job is now to rein in junior developers
That's quite the paternalistic and insulting approach.
We were all "junior" at some point.
I don't find mentoring boring. I find it one of the most engaging and enjoyable aspects of becoming a senior/lead on my team.
However, code reviews can be a mixed bag. Seeing people get overly focused or "clever" with formatting when we have a style guide and an auto formatter. Just use the formatter.
Seeing mid-level engineers blindly enforcing their personal "best practices" where they don't really apply (e.g. debating about what fields should be public/private final/non-final in unit test classes).
Junior engineers completely missing the mark of how to add comments (e.g. adding inane and redundant comments on incredibly obvious code but not a single comment around really complex or important code)
It’s funny that you take offense with my use of “rein in”, then proceed to complain about the “inane and redundant” comments that junior developers write, amongst other pretty minor complaints about your colleagues.
What is it you thought I meant by “rein in”? To crush their dreams and impose my will on them? What I meant was that it can take a lot of work to make sure they produce good designs and high quality code, because they don’t have the experience to do it on their own a lot of the time.
> However, code reviews can be a mixed bag. Seeing people get overly focused or "clever" with formatting when we have a style guide and an auto formatter. Just use the formatter.
Integrate a linter which automatically checks against your style guide when someone sends a pull request and you will never have this problem.
People have different preferences. You like mentoring; OP doesn't.
Maybe it should be voluntary. Like, if some people want to do code reviews, they should be allowed to do it even outside their teams... which would mean that the senior developer in the other team does not have to.
That's quite the paternalistic and insulting approach.
We were all "junior" at some point.
I don't find mentoring boring. I find it one of the most engaging and enjoyable aspects of becoming a senior/lead on my team.
However, code reviews can be a mixed bag. Seeing people get overly focused or "clever" with formatting when we have a style guide and an auto formatter. Just use the formatter.
Seeing mid-level engineers blindly enforcing their personal "best practices" where they don't really apply (e.g. debating about what fields should be public/private final/non-final in unit test classes).
Junior engineers completely missing the mark of how to add comments (e.g. adding inane and redundant comments on incredibly obvious code but not a single comment around really complex or important code)