[quickthrower2]

“Yeah I got to figure that myself too”

As a senior I often find myself needing to say this and I hate saying it. I’ll do my best to solve the problem and sit with them look through the code etc. first.

Sometimes code has been written by ex employees and it complex and not well documented. I don’t always have all the answers to hand.

I do my bet to set them up for a win and if I have time will try to solve the problem in parallel so next time they ask I might know more.

That said wading through undocumented spaghetti is a good skill to learn!

[mooreds]

I agree with this so much. If you are giving your team autonomy, they may well be much closer to the problem than you are. While you, as a more experienced dev, may have seen situations like this before, or have opinions grounded in past experience, they'll be the ones who have spent the time thinking about it.

Often problems that less experienced devs have come to me with are gnarly and it's more of a consultation than me handing answers to them.