IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT said:

I like the idea of training up juniors. But the reality is that the ones you need to train aren't worth training in most cases. I have one guy I have been mentoring for 2 years now. He has soared to the levels of mediocre. He misunderstands things constantly and then blabs about irrelevant nonsense he heard somewhere not realizing it isn't relevant to what we are talking about. He is extremely personable and affable though so I do make him do all the "customer facing" stuff as he is good at that.

Contrasted by the good hires who simply pursue whatever challenges you give them and figure it out. Thus requiring no training or mentoring outside of basic things regarding infrastructure unique to the organization.

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TJT said:

I like the idea of training up juniors. But the reality is that the ones you need to train aren't worth training in most cases. I have one guy I have been mentoring for 2 years now. He has soared to the levels of mediocre. He misunderstands things constantly and then blabs about irrelevant nonsense he heard somewhere not realizing it isn't relevant to what we are talking about. He is extremely personable and affable though so I do make him do all the "customer facing" stuff as he is good at that.

Contrasted by the good hires who simply pursue whatever challenges you give them and figure it out. Thus requiring no training or mentoring outside of basic things regarding infrastructure unique to the organization.

Click to expand...

ShakyJake said:

I wanted to get some opinions on whether or not I should email our new director of software engineering about something that’s been on my mind. He’s made it clear that he’s open to feedback, and he seems like a good guy, so I figure now might be the right time to address a potential issue—just don’t want to come off as *that* developer who thinks they know it all.

Basically, there’s talk about developing a new software app, and I want to make sure we’re on solid ground with the software stack we choose. Flashback to a few years ago: when we had to rebuild our core app from Silverlight (which was becoming obsolete), they put together a team to research new frameworks, and they came back with Angular and .NET Core, which were both barely out of beta. Our engineering team wasn’t experienced with client-side JavaScript, and now, nearly eight years later, we’re left with a pretty janky product. No one really had the playbook for best practices back then, so a lot of it was trial and error.

Looking back, a simpler choice like React or ASP.NET MVC with light JavaScript would probably have suited our needs better, especially since our app mainly shows tabular data. But it felt like we went with the newest, trendiest stack just for the sake of it.

So, my question for the new director would be, “If we’re getting serious about this new app, could we make sure there’s a solid research process to evaluate all options, instead of just grabbing onto whatever’s shiny and new?” What do you guys think—is this worth emailing him about, or should I hold back?

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