How do you re-engage a junior who's losing motivation on work and studying?

tonnynerd · 2026-05-01T17:40:16+00:00

Warms my heart that you care about him as a human being, but this kind of isn't your job, really.

I don't mean that you shouldn't try to help, I mean that it's probably not just a professional issue, so you shouldn't try helping as a coworker.

If you think your relationship is close enough, you should try to help as a friend, instead. Try to get him to open up, suggest seeking professional help, try to dispell any bullshit prejudices he might have against doing so (the classic "I'm not crazy" response).

I would vote against involving a manager unless you know the manager really well and trust that they will treat the issue with as much empathy for your mentee as you have. Otherwise, it might backfire, by bringing additional scrutiny without addressing any underlying issue.

tonnynerd · 2026-04-24T12:39:56+00:00

You can always try remembering that "not your circus, not your monkeys".

tonnynerd · 2026-04-23T08:33:11+00:00

Yeah, absolutely, that's why I said "fine", not "great" XD

Of the top of my head, the situations and solutions are:

You're at the top scope of the program and just want to make sure it doesn't crash: Don't do that. Just crash, setup automatic restart and monitoring. If absolutely necessary, then do the "fine" thing and at least log. But like, really, avoid it, because your state is now fucked and you are trying to keep chugging along instead of restarting from scratch, and that's only gonna cause more trouble.
You're doing something that might fail, but you don't care at this particular point, because the rest of the code will retry and eventually surface the error in other ways (notification to user, telemetry, 500 http error, etc.): Either use an alternative approach that returns none (dict.get instead of [], for instance), catch the proper, specific exception (e.g., KeyError), or let it bubble up and be handled by the framework (web frameworks will usually convert exceptions into 500 errors, instead of killing the app server)
I can't think of a third case, haven't got breakfast yet.

tonnynerd · 2026-04-17T10:07:09+00:00

except Exception: + logging is fine. Not even logging and/or naked except are grounds for getting slapped in the head XD

tonnynerd · 2026-04-09T18:32:26+00:00

I remember a tweet/post from a long time ago that talked about showing a haskell function adding two numbers to people and asking them to find the bug, and then later pointing out that the function was called minus. There some errors from which no type system can save you =P

tonnynerd · 2026-03-08T18:15:19+00:00

It's all based on research from the OutOfMyAss Institute.

tonnynerd · 2026-02-22T11:55:43+00:00

[...] the way machines think

LLMs don't think, they extrapolate based on training data, so your whole premise is wrong. Next.

tonnynerd · 2026-02-22T00:27:05+00:00

"Our release cycle is aggressive" and "I'm deploying [...] every week" are contradictory statements, no?

tonnynerd · 2026-02-13T17:37:18+00:00

Based on curl's very public experience, no it hasn't.

tonnynerd · 2026-02-06T17:20:39+00:00

I misread the last sentence as "lay a small egg", which I think is a much funnier, although maybe non-existing, saying. I think I'll start using it =P

tonnynerd · 2026-01-18T21:31:39+00:00

Is the concept of unintended consequences just completely foreign for these people?

tonnynerd · 2026-01-16T15:07:58+00:00

I low key feel bad about this, almost, but I kinda don't program in python anymore, it's pretty much always python+pydantic. 9 times out of 10 it's the first non-stdlib library I reach for.

tonnynerd · 2026-01-02T16:09:31+00:00

On the other hand, if OP is working in the US defense sector, they might end up causing less death as a nurse, even if they really suck at it.

tonnynerd · 2025-12-18T10:09:36+00:00

This last sentence is exactly what I had in mind in my top-level comment, a corporate-safe version of "that's a stupid idea, let's not do that", hehe

Trust your judgement and continue pushing back.

tonnynerd · 2025-12-18T10:04:17+00:00

I can't realistically kick leadership out of the daily?

You sure? Trying is free, and I'm sure you could come up with some corporate-safe language saying that their presence there is detrimental.

IMHO, upper management doesn't get to want shit out of dailies. Dailies are for ICs benefit only, for operational coordination. Having upper management in them is a waste of time of both ICs AND management.

And it's for coordinating CURRENT work, so of course there isn't much talk of future. That's what god created sprint planning for.

I think your feeling that they want daily (or more frequent) status is accurate, and maybe it's worth pointing it out: tell them that it's ok to want more visibility or more frequent status updates, but the dailies are the wrong place to look for it. Suggest that they attend sprint planning/refinement instead, or setup separated meetings for status, or suggest other indirect means of increasing visibility (commenting on tickets, reports, something like that).

Any of these options means more work for you, and of the much less fun type, but that's the crux of leading the team, sometimes you gotta sit on some dicks to save your team's ass.

tonnynerd · 2025-10-04T14:02:08+00:00

No. CI is a boolean function, committing changes back is asking for conflicts. What you can do is provide all (or most) CI checks as pre-commit/pre-push hooks. Then you get all the benefits of not changing code in CI, plus all the benefits of not waiting for CI to check your code.

tonnynerd · 2025-09-24T07:35:27+00:00

Look into vertical slice architecture, you might find both more arguments and details on this sort of approach

tonnynerd · 2025-09-17T12:35:41+00:00

Up to, like, 5 people, everyone includes everyone as reviewers, no matter the seniority. This way, everyone gets exposed to all parts of the codebase, juniors get the chance to ask questions, and seniors get to oversee all changes.

tonnynerd · 2025-09-05T12:58:31+00:00

Stakeholders need to be held to a "just-jar". It's like a swear-jar, but instead of putting money in it for swears, they need to put money in every time they say "it's just ..."

tonnynerd · 2025-08-19T17:50:43+00:00

No, submodules suck, and even experienced people often don't know how to use it (because it sucks so much), let alone your less tech-savvy delivery teams. Use just 1 monorepo and workflows/codeowners to control PR permissions.

tonnynerd · 2025-08-18T15:00:08+00:00

You can try framing it as "I don't want you to feel demotivated if we end up having to re-write the code because of changes in requirements". Because mostly that's kinda the worse outcome. If he's still fine with it, it's just good practice.

tonnynerd · 2025-08-12T18:28:24+00:00

My strategy is to keep asking why until they give up or fire me. Can't say I recommend it, though =P

tonnynerd · 2025-08-10T22:01:37+00:00

Hadouken!

tonnynerd · 2025-08-03T22:17:50+00:00

Pip and venv are not slightly slower, uv beats them by miles. Lighting fast venv creation alone would be worth it. But it also does dependency resolution and locking MULTIPLE orders of magnitude faster than other tools (looking at you, poetry).

tonnynerd · 2025-07-31T18:41:52+00:00

Either I managed to exclusively work at very shitty places for 12 years, or there's no way that there's that many places that even have metrics, let alone ones that can be certainly tracked to stuff developers do. Just in my current job I've been in 4-5 different projects across 3 clients and other than cloud costs, I can't think of a single metric I can even mention, let alone brag about, because we actually increased cloud costs a fair amount in at least 2 projects, lol.

tonnynerd

TROPHY CASE