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by balabaster 4199 days ago
I agree to a point. As a lead developer, you should care about it all, but it's also your job to be a mentor. Give your junior devs just enough rope to hang themselves, but be close enough by and approachable enough so that they don't. A little pointer like, "think about this approach" or "don't use a dictionary here because..." or "generics will be your friend here, but beware of x, y and z".

You should be holding your junior developers accountable for writing tests for their code, ensuring that the test coverage is there, ensuring they understand what problem they're solving, ensuring they understand the approach they're taking, ensuring they understand the repercussions of the decisions they're making. This is how they advance from junior to intermediate and eventually to senior.

It is your job as the senior/lead developer to groom your junior devs to make the steps forward and eventually do your job. You shouldn't be telling them how to write the code. When picking holes in their code, it should be constructive, don't just to pick holes in it to pick holes in it, making them feel bad. The goal is to help them understand what's not up to par, why it's not up to par and what approach they can take to fix it. You should neither be writing code for them, nor should you be expecting they make every decision in the same way you would.