I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

I was waiting in the lobby of a recuiting place, hearing all their speeches. All super generic stuff, like "I looked at your resume and I have a bunch of cutting edge opportunities in the pipeline that are going fast, which I think you are a perfect fit for!" Which I don't argue is always invalid, just after hearing the same copy and paste speech, you start to wonder.

I even saw a few stand up and wave their hands around while trying to make a meh position sound like the latest golden egg.

I left with a feeling that recuiters would be a great inspiration for a "Wolf of Wall street" styled movie.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

Everything we have in life is a set of illusions, one seemingly more real than the other. When a child pees themselves in their sleep, they pee in a perfectly real bucket. They hear a steady, real sound of urine hitting the wall, confirming they didn’t miss, but somehow, it doesn’t sit well with them, and they doubt. A serious, full-grown adult is different in just one thing — they also shit themselves.

They lack that doubt that brings the child closer to the truth. Instead, adults have a so-called “scientific worldview”, that, in a nutshell, is about how the bucket is real because of the sound, and the sound is real because of the bucket, and thus, we all should be working 24/7.

To help a serious, full-grown adult wake up from this reality, death exists.

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".