Toxic team members?

Question

Any senior devs remember what it was like being the newbie in the tech industry?

It definitely isn't easy being new and the senior devs aren't exactly supportive. I don't want to feel like a snowflake and think they're being overly mean. But whenever I ask for help, it's like "if you just Google it..." or "you don't need to know this."

It really makes me want to stop asking questions or speaking up. I just feel dumb and begin to doubt whether or not this career is right for me.

Has anyone gone through this kind of situation?

Taylor · Accepted Answer

I've worked with engineers who are really great at dealing with questions and some who are terrible. The biggest difference is often the tone. The terrible experiences have been with senior engineers who only mention negative things.

It sounds silly, but having a code review where a senior engineer at least says something like, "It looks like you've put a lot of work into this. I like this piece because of X."  Then moved on to shitting on the rest of my code feels a lot different from someone who just says negative stuff in short sentences.

The tone helps a lot.

19g616kynapf0e · Answer

Make sure you describe the steps that you’ve already performed (and why you thought that they may be useful). Some times, experienced people will feel exasperated if they feel that you haven’t done the “legwork” to get the answer yourself.

7nh139rfdhg4xju · Answer

Sounds like you need some proper mentorship. Usually this happens at companies or teams that are resource-strapped and therefore need the Senior Devs dedicated to projects instead of having set time for mentorship, guidance, and development for newer engineers. It's pretty common, and is why it may be worthwhile for new engineers to join a more mature stable company so you have more time with mentors and managers on your team. That said, you should have a chat with your manager to align on expectations without ratting any specific people out

19g616kyjozggk · Answer

I agree with what others have already said AND, mention this in your 1/1 with your manager. (Hopefully, you have those.) Maybe the senior devs are overworked. Maybe they're insecure or a bit too full of themselves (the brilliant jerk problem). Maybe you're not using their time effectively or really just asking questions that can easily be found by a simple Google or internal documentation search.

Especially with WFH, it's very hard for a manager to sniff out these sorts of situations so you really need to bring it to their attention. If it's a problem with one particular engineer, it's a safe bet that it's not happening just with you. Your manager can do something about this because part of what has engineers get promoted is the level of leadership and mentorship they demonstrate on the team and the manager can remind them of that.

jinyung2 · Answer

big difference between "if you just Google it..." and "you dont need to know this". 
questions that you could have Google'd might be simpler in nature and could really have been googled, I think the next step from that (which I end up doing a lot) is like: "hey I was curious about X and I googled it and I got Y results. can you help me better understand this/elaborate on this?"

but "you dont need to know this" sounds more like they either are just too busy to help you, or just dont have any desire to provide any mentorship :(

Toxic team members?

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