Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working …on one machine, at some point.

On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn’t compile and seemed to be missing some commits.

So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn’t set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.

Our team lead was fuming, but they’ve been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.

Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it’s there, until it’s not.

• Bosses
• Figuring out why a project failed

Name a less iconic duo.