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by alexandercrohde·10y ago·view on hn ↗
My suggestion is:

1. Let go of your frustration for now, a company is an incredibly complex machine and you need to invest more than 6 months learning how it works before people take your criticism seriously (I know this can be hard). Also, some people like to 'grill' the newbie as a right of passage, you may be experiencing this.

2. Acknowledge that code-reuse is awesome. It's great that there's reusable functionality, part of your job is memorizing the handy tools at a company and if they're good enough, rebuilding those tools later at your next job.

3. It sounds like you're frustrated that you don't find out about existing libraries/functions/classes/tools until your code review. That seems like a reasonable concern. Maybe next time you have a project come up with a rough plan and ask a senior developer for architecture-level feedback before you start coding.

4. Don't feel bad. You don't need to be a hero or change the world. If you mimic the senior engineers and try to fit in that'll go further than studying engineering theory, writing perfect code, or documenting the codebase. Once you're accepted into the group they'll be much more receptive to your ideas on how fix things.

1 comments
> It sounds like you're frustrated that you don't find out about existing libraries/functions/classes/tools until your code review. That seems like a reasonable concern. Maybe next time you have a project come up with a rough plan and ask a senior developer for architecture-level feedback before you start coding.

I couldn't agree with this point more. When I first started, my team lead gave me a rough plan to add new features so that I wouldn't go in blind. Until I could stand without the support of others, I drafted a quick plan of action to get the task accomplish. This let my team lead know how I was planning on accomplishing the task while allowing them to point out existing code that would take care something I would have written.

It seems like unnecessary overhead, but the 5 minute conversation up front saves more time down the road.