"Senior" holds no weight with me. I've had plenty dumb founding conversations with "seniors".
My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application).
I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the error.
I was like, "You know when you do new[] you need to use delete[]?" as all of his deletions were without [].
> I was like, "You know when you do new[] you need to use delete[]?" as all of his deletions were without [].
This seems like a pretty major lack of a specific piece of knowledge on the senior developers part, yes, but it seems like a much more unforgivable miss on the part of the code reviewers. Was the team stuck in a rut where only a single person (with coincidentally the same blind spot) was reviewing his code, or did multiple reviewers somehow miss this?
I've worked with a consultancy that prouded itself by exclusively hiring top engineers from top universities and I swear, I can put my hand in boiling hot oil and tell you, they were some of the worst coders I've ever seen, I have no doubts I've met way more brilliant people coming from boot camps.
The fact that people study for exams has absolutely no correlation with how much they will remember or care for what they studied, none.
Titles really mean very little. The company I work at recently hired a DevOps specialist to help configure Docker services and assist with development. He was a decent developer but had no idea how to securely configure server side services. Still stuck with his mess two years later :)
My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application).
I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the error.
I was like, "You know when you do new[] you need to use delete[]?" as all of his deletions were without [].
The look on his face was the best.