[beager]

There’s great wisdom here from an obviously enlightened crowd, but I will say, as a php dev for 9 years, permissive attitudes toward bad advice about programming did hold me back as an engineer.

I know php is the butt of many jokes about bad language design and bad architecture, but I wasn’t helped by the glut of terrible, outdated advice about php programming that just wouldn’t go away. I could have benefited from a forceful, constructive voice that not only helped me solve my problem, but taught me to seek a higher sophistication for the code I was writing.

And that’s where I think advanced developers turn into humiliating jerks. I would wager that most of them aren’t deliberately trying to excoriate junior devs, they just are frustrated that developers are repeating the same inefficient path to good practice that they may have trod. Instead of being short-fused and curt, they should take time to inventory the positive things that helped them, and pass those tidbits of effective advice along.

It’s very hard to pause and take note of resources or insights that made you much better as a developer. However, those who can are able to give junior devs a shortcut to excellence that is a net benefit to everyone around them, instead of just getting frustrated that the junior devs aren’t achieving enlightenment as fast as they themselves would have liked to.