Comment by Manyata Goyal on "What is the greatest flaw you see in junior developers?"

CommentWhat is the greatest flaw you see in junior developers?

Manyata Goyal

Mar 21, 2017

Couple of things I have noticed:

Almost all focus on code and not enough on monitoring it once it reaches production.
Lack of coding consistency and conventions and not enough emphasis on readability. Treating conventions as second class citizens in a distributed codebase where more than one person is going to contribute and maintain leads to a lot of confusion and hard to read code.
Not able to understand the value add of good formatting, understandable variable names, class names which say what they are, method names which say what they do and do what they say.
Over estimating or under estimating the amount of time it might take to finish something.
Accruing tech debt while trying to finish work fast and never going back to fix it.
Hardcoding of DB urls, passwords, thread counts, message strings (in case of UI).

Todd

Software Security TechLead

Mar 21, 2017

Do you think the variable and type naming issues come from laziness or could it be inherited from the algorithms and data structures college classes which use mathematics-inspired notation often in the form of single letter variable names? I never understood that and found it to be extrenely cryptic to say the least but for some reason they seem to stick with it in a lot of college classes since they are more theoretical in nature. A good example of this is the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

The thing is, I have had both kinds of college courses. Algorithm and DS classes would never place any emphasis on variable names, but software engineering courses would tell you how important all of that really is and the advantages.

So in my opinion, its a little bit of both. Maybe they just don't know better and no one else has taken the time to explain to them the importance of this and it has been accepted by others. I have noticed that in senior engineers also. They would very rarely take the time and explain the importance of coding conventions and naming paradigms to juniors.

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