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by hbrn 1300 days ago
Plenty of bad advise here.

It sounds like you already made up your mind about this person and came here to enforce your confirmation bias.

Since I've been on both sides of this story, I'm going to be the devil's advocate.

> I try as much as possible to explain _why_ practices are what they are, the effects on our project, the team, etc. Any suggestions for these conversations in the future?

How about showing the hard evidence that those practices are beneficial and a net positive? Let me guess, you don't have that. If you had, there wouldn't be a debate. My bet is you don't even have metrics to look at in the future that will prove your practices are beneficial.

> Sending a large PR that changes many files at once because their changes kept growing in scope as they were trying to figure out how to do something

Is this a one-off you're looking to attack them on, or a consistent behavior? Based on the description I suspect it's a one off. If it's consistent, it is pretty bad. Since it looks like you're already got off the wrong foot, you'll need other team members to advocate for smaller PR.

> The benefits of unit tests are so fundamental

Ah, the cargo-culting. The benefits of testing are fundamental. But testing is hard. Unit testing is a way for lousy engineers to pretend to do testing.

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests

> On Friday, I discovered a chunk of code copied from Stackoverflow ... The person said things like "how would anyone find out"

Was it a 2-line or 100-line snippet? Context matters.

The person you're describing might indeed be a toxic asshole you want them to be. But it is also quite possible that you are the asshole here, mischaracterizing them to confirm your bias.

2 comments

Pretty much this. Context matters so much. Even at a higher-level, imagine this at a FAANG vs. startup finding product market fit. The situations are completely different.
The answer is: there are rules adopted by the team, and the only accepted way to change them if they are not optimal from the point of person described in the post is by challenging the rules explicitly, not by trying to violate them.