Comment by Philip-J-Fry
2 years ago
>In a good pairing environment everyone is learning from everyone. You didn't explicitly say you were looking to learn for others though you also didn't explicitly say you weren't.
Well that's the thing. The only reason I'm in a senior position at this company is because I never stopped asking questions and I still don't stop asking questions and learning from people more knowledgeable than me. I used to spend hours sitting at one guys desk just asking questions and listening to rants and just gathering knowledge.
I learned that this was the fastest way to progress and get better at the job, but I'm not finding that juniors and other less experienced devs are doing the same thing because they're worried about wasting people's time. And people are less likely to encourage this behaviour because they have high priority work. I got away with it when I joined the company because the rate of change was so much lower and so things generally just took longer.
Yep, I feel this is a general broken thing about our industry. I'm very against the whole, "let juniors do easier stuff," mentality. I'm also very against the "you must make big disruptive changes in order to get ahead," as well. The latter often results in people just looking in the wrong places to try and improve things, often by introducing complexity instead of removing it.
I'm pretty jaded by it all. These days I work for a company whose primary business isn't technology and I'm much happier.