A senior developer told me 'stop asking for permission' during a code review last month

I was in a code review at work. We were going over a new feature I built for our customer dashboard. The senior dev, Mark, looked at my pull request and said 'why did you wait for me to approve this before fixing the styling issue? You knew it was wrong.' I told him I wanted to make sure it was right first. He said 'stop asking for permission. If you know it's broken, just fix it and explain later.' It stuck with me because I always worried about stepping on toes. Now I fix things first and ask questions after. Has anyone else had a boss or coworker give you advice that changed how you work?

3 comments

3 Comments

kim.jake23d ago

nah but that "it was broken so I fixed it" attitude can get you in trouble real quick. i had a guy on my team who just went around "fixing" stuff without talking to anyone and ended up breaking a whole feature cause he didnt understand the full picture. sometimes you gotta ask first

margareto2623d ago

My old coworker had this rule about never fixing someone else's variable names even if they were terrible because it was "their baby." One time I changed a variable from "dataThing" to "customerList" and they got so mad they reverted it in front of the whole team. What @karenh56 said about bigger changes is the real trick. Mark actually told me to just do the small stuff first and if anyone questions it, say "it was broken so I fixed it." That shut down the pushback pretty fast.

karenh5624d ago

That's a good point but how do you figure out the line between just fixing things and stepping on someone's toes when it's a bigger change... like something that affects how other people's code works too?

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