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by quickthrower2 1313 days ago
From that example. My take:

You explained clearly and respectfully with the background info what you need.

They came back with a question. An odd question. I suspect:

* They are not experienced

* They have been “punished” before because someone asked for “X, and common sense implies X,Y” but the requestor wanted “X,Z”. So they ask dumb questions to be sure.

* Not enough coffee, and realtime conversation they didn’t parse what you said properly.

I would take the question with a sense of calm and not worry. It is a good think they are asking questions. Encourage dumb questions. 1% of the time they are smart questions.

As a senior dev it could be your time to shine with some mentoring:

“It would be fantastic to have a stack trace on every log, but I suspect this would cause performance problems and increase our log storage costs. It is sufficient to only have stack traces when an exception occurs”

I guess you said something like this at the time.

By the way stack trace logs where there are no exceptions are something I have done, but not every log.

Aside: A stack trace for every log almost sounds like a cool startup idea or monitoring product differentiator, as long as the UX is good and it doesn’t add noise.

1 comments

They are experienced, we were equals, maybe I'm just under him, maybe that was what we was trying to assert.

Again this was an observed pattern, not just one time.