i have been on an ever onward journey to try to find the balance:
- is a developer making the same set of mistakes? send them information on a better strategy to try overall
- how bad is this mistake? Is it just something that I know how to do better, or legitimately a broken way of thinking?
- what is worse, a slightly inefficient or unpretty algorithm, OR someone researching the problem / solution
Point is, 90% of my comments were meaningless. I really comment when things look wrong -- Did they misunderstand the intent of the ticket, did they verify everything with product because this looks weird, did they check the edge cases, did they forget about this other behavior, etc. All that I just mentioned is the real meat-and-potatoes. Code-fu is important, but less important than the other stuff. And if you are a calm, trusted, and mentoring team member, those same people will come to you to up their code-fu voluntarily.
- is a developer making the same set of mistakes? send them information on a better strategy to try overall
- how bad is this mistake? Is it just something that I know how to do better, or legitimately a broken way of thinking?
- what is worse, a slightly inefficient or unpretty algorithm, OR someone researching the problem / solution
Point is, 90% of my comments were meaningless. I really comment when things look wrong -- Did they misunderstand the intent of the ticket, did they verify everything with product because this looks weird, did they check the edge cases, did they forget about this other behavior, etc. All that I just mentioned is the real meat-and-potatoes. Code-fu is important, but less important than the other stuff. And if you are a calm, trusted, and mentoring team member, those same people will come to you to up their code-fu voluntarily.