So if you're reviewing a PR for someone who's a beginner, pinpoint the stuff they're doing really well. Say, oh yes, this is great variable naming. It's great how you broke down this feature into different functions. All of that is awesome. They're going to do more of that, get better, and everything they do will become better. But if you have an expert, someone who's already really good at the code, you want to focus on, hey, this code is in the wrong place. You should move it somewhere else. Or hey, that comment you made yesterday during a meeting, that was bad. Don't say stuff like that because it discourages others. So yeah, keep feedback timely and focus on talking about bringing up the rear and improving the worst parts of expert's performance while focusing on the good parts of the newbie performance so that they can do more of that and they will just automatically get better.
Remember, the same is true for you. You need encouragement on the stuff that's new for you, and you need feedback on the stuff that you're already good at. Your other role as the team lead or whatever is to keep everyone focused on the outcomes. You're the bad cop who says, yes, that's cool, but what does it help us do? This is the part that really sucks. You want to play with all the new tech and fun toys, but you've got to be the adult who says no. Everything you do needs to lead to an outcome. You don't have time for navel gazing, for debates about the right code structure, or any of that. You need to get results.
You need new superpowers, new features, new abilities for the stakeholders. There should always be an outcome for everything that you do. Obviously, let people engage their curiosity, but keep them focused. When they find work that needs doing, say, great, what does that give us? When they find code they want to refactor, say, awesome, how exactly is it blocking you? Because if it's not actually blocking them, they don't need to fix it right now. And always try to find ways to make their work useful sooner. There's more people waiting than you realize. For example, we just had a feature where one of my engineers was working on building new announcements for our product. Always find ways to make their work useful sooner. There's more people waiting than you realize. For example, we just had a feature where one of my engineers was building announcements where one of those little pop-up bubbles, you click on it and you see, wow, you guys have a new feature. This is so cool. Nobody really cares, but you need to tell people about new features.
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