Category: Mentoring Notes

In medicine there is the concept of a disease being “subclinical”, and I think the concept can apply to bullying in the workplace.

Every workplace has a threshold for bad behaviour, and subclinical bullying is bad behaviour which doesn’t cross the threshold. Much like how a doctor often won’t treat a subclinical disease, your manager often won’t address subclinical bullying. There are lots of reasons why this might be the case, for better or for worse. One of those reasons might be that your manager is showing grace, which can feel unfair, but is also important for a healthy team dynamic.

Work should be completed in a series of small changes, where each change is a polished, fully-working improvement.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Applying for a junior engineering position, or any job, is an exercise in marketing and sales. You are the product, and the employer is a potential customer. To market and sell anything effectively, you need to understand how the customer thinks.

In this article, I want to explore a bit of employer psychology when it comes to hiring juniors, and give some suggestions that I believe increase your chance of success.

Rule Of Thumb

RSpec examples should have enough detail in the descriptions to rewrite them from scratch.

Rule Of Thumb

Start with high-level tests, and step down to lower levels when the implementation is stable.