Someone Whose Blog Taught You the Job Has Joined Your Team

The new hire announcement goes round on Monday, and you read the name twice. It is the person whose blog posts got you through your first year. You learned testing from their articles. You have quoted them in pull requests. On Wednesday they are sitting next to you in the planning meeting, asking where the deployment scripts live.

It is very easy to shrink in that situation. To agree with everything they say, to stop offering your own ideas in front of them, to approve their pull requests without really reading them because surely they know best.

Here is the thing to hold on to. They know a great deal about software in general. They know almost nothing about your system yet. You know why the billing service retries three times, which customer the strange date handling exists for, and which dashboard to trust when the numbers disagree. For the next few months, on the work in front of you both, you are the more experienced person in an important way.

So help them the way you would help any new colleague. Show them where things live. Explain the history. Answer their questions fully instead of nervously, and tell them when an idea from their blog will not fit here and why. A good engineer will be glad of that, because it is exactly the context they need.

Review their code properly. Read it as carefully as anybody else's, and leave the comment if something looks wrong. If you skip that, you are not showing respect. You are leaving them without the review everyone else gets, on a codebase they do not know.

Say it once, if you want to. Your posts on testing taught me a lot when I started. Most writers are quietly delighted to hear it. Then let it go, and treat them as a teammate rather than a celebrity. They joined a team, not an audience.

Notice, too, that they ask questions, get things wrong and look things up, just like you. The people we learn from at a distance are always more polished than the people we work beside. That gap was never about them being better. It was about only seeing their finished work.

– Asael Shinder