Comment by tastysandwich
2 years ago
When I joined my company, I was introduced to this dev who'd been there since the start.
His English wasn't great. His Javascript wasn't "modern" - he kept using callbacks etc. He often poo-poohed ideas the younger wizz-bang devs had. And so I was warned - basically he's an old curmudgeon, set in his ways, he can't take any criticism but he'll dole it out, a pain to deal with.
I quickly learnt how untrue that all was. OK, his code isn't great. BUT he's 100% committed to delivering customer value. He understands the ins-and-outs like no one else. He thinks through every scenario from the customer's perspective, and absolutely NAILS it every time. The young devs didn't like him because he didn't give a shit about "GraphQL versus REST" or "Hapi.js vs Express vs Koa vs whatever".
Where the other teams would avoid involving him in design conversations, I'd pull him in straight away. And our team reaped the rewards of integration projects that delivered right out of the starting gate, rather than customers kicking them right back with complaints.
Had this same issue, new young devs adding the latest programming tricks and saying yes to every fking thing as if a no will get hurt their “I can do anything” mentality. Others were not pushing back as it may make them look stupid or something, they treat the project like a social event.
A lot of these little things came back to bite hard