Comment by dharmab
2 years ago
I sometimes use my job title as a higher level senior or lead to say vulnerable things like:
"This change is hard for me to read and understand"
or
"This is a large PR, and it may be difficult for me to schedule time to review it. Can it be split up into a series?"
I also configure linters and code quality tools to automatically flag some of the more egregious problems.
> "This change is hard for me to read and understand"
Believe it or not, I consulted at one place where the manager decided I was the problem because I was consistently assessing problem code and team processes in similar ways. She asserted that "everyone else understood", even when they plainly didn't understand but where just going through the motions.
Said manager had a number of other issues as well. Worst gig I can recall having in the last couple of decades.
I would start being less diplomatic once I get the hunch polite phrasing isn’t getting through - “this code is badly structured, brittle and will make debugging harder”. As programmers being tactless is expected so might as well use it to your benefit.
In this case, I could have, but I felt my time was better spent thinking about why things were complex and hard to understand and made notes on that, mostly for my future self. Whenever I found the opportunity, I would include some of the reasoning and explanation, in written form, in my feedback. I didn't get much out of that gig, but I did end up with several thousand words of ideas and observations. I wouldn't be surprised if some future programmer on that project ran across something I left behind and found it useful, or at least comforting.
Edit to add: in 1:1s with the manager I was more direct. About the best I can say about that is "at least I tried".
I can relate though I wish I could get into a position that I could say such things and not get fired. In some circles "This change is hard to me to read and understand" would be interpreted as "I'm an aging dinosaur who doesn't understand this new tech; you youngsters are too clever for me." (though I realize how completely wrong it is).
I'm 33 but I feel like I already have to make an effort to avoid the dinosaur label. I disagree with a lot of modern tech trends but I simply cannot express my view about them even though I could explain the problems very clearly and logically and can provide far better and simpler alternatives. Unfortunately, hype does not yield to reasoning... And sometimes, you're too far into the tech debt and it doesn't make financial sense to rewrite.
I’m 10 years older, my experience has been that getting to ask stupid questions is one of the joys of age/seniority/security. Very often everyone else in the room has the same stupid question but you get to look like a stone cold genius because you were willing to risk looking silly.
I guess maybe in 10 years I'll be working with 30 year olds who understand and value of that approach as I do today.
My current reality is that I'm a 33 year old working with 20 year olds who think they're geniuses who are going to take over the world in 5 years; from that viewpoint, I'm essentially a failed engineer because I didn't build a Facebook, Uber or AirBnB even though I had 10 years to do it.
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Don't mislead yourself, that benefit comes exclusively from security. Age and seniority only contribution is some weak correlation to security.
My secret weapon (rarely needed) is “I got this eventually, but someone may have trouble quickly figuring it out during a 3 AM outage.”