Team-Culture

The first time I watched a senior engineer tear apart a junior’s pull request, I didn’t say anything. The feedback was technically correct. Every comment pointed to a real issue, a naming convention, an edge case, a slightly inefficient pattern. Nothing was wrong with the review itself.

Everything was wrong with how it landed.

The junior didn’t submit another PR for three days. When they did, it was half the size it should have been, over-engineered in the places where the senior had left comments and under-thought everywhere else. They’d learned a lesson, but not the one we wanted them to learn. They’d learned that code review was a test you could fail.

I’ve been leading engineering teams for over eleven years. In that time, I’ve never lost an engineer I didn’t want to lose.

I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it because it surprises people, and when they ask how, I never have a satisfying answer. There’s no framework. There’s no retention programme. There’s no career ladder with carefully defined levels and competency matrices. There’s just a way of working that, apparently, makes people want to stick around.