> how much they disparage the previous team's work.
And many fail to discern between "disparage" and "critique" or even "Question in order to learn"
One of the greatest failings I've seen in leadership in our time is the idea that in order to make a critique one must come with a solution in hand. As a leader I want to know the things that are going wrong as soon as they're seen, not to require someone to go through the heavy lifting of a solution before they say a word. Now, of course, there's a difference between bitter unhelpful cynicism, and simply identifying a gap between the current state and optimality.
> And many fail to discern between "disparage" and "critique" or even "Question in order to learn"
I think I’ve had the conversation with new to my organization devs a few hundred times: “Look... saying code is crap or stupid is telling others you’ve given up on learning. How about asking why it is the way it is?”
> greatest failings I've seen in leadership in our time is the idea that in order to make a critique one must come with a solution in hand.
The pattern works at very high levels in an org chart, but with developers and those that manage them it breaks the whole concept of problem solving. You have to be able to identify and understand problems before you can come up with a solution... and usually, with software, the solution is developer hours.
I always pick apart previous teams' work.. it's how I learn. I question most every decision because I'm curious why they made those decisions. And it lets me think about how I'd do it better. And yes, I know that many poor decisions are not necessarily the developer's fault. It could be bad specs, lack of time, etc.
In most cases, "better" means different things in different contexts. (Customer-driven vs performance-driven, for example) Of course, this isn't news for most of us. Where I think a lot of us fall short is assuming that definition has changed since the code was written.
This harkens back to Chesterton’s Fence. It’s always worthwhile to interrogate why things were done the way they were, especially when first coming onto a project. Knowing the why of a decision is essential to understanding if and how it should be changed. Especially if the reason is “this is what we had the time and knowledge to do at the time.”
> It’s always worthwhile to interrogate why things were done the way they were
It really isn't. A lot of the time you end up spending a lot of effort to understand something that was dumb to start with and has been dumb ever since. Something like the bullshit asymmetry principle applies - any idiot can take 5 minutes to write a line of code that will baffle a team of experts for hours. (I've done so often enough myself).
The people who have those answers have long gone. The only person left is a project manager who tells you it's up to you to figure it out. After you make a change in production they will come to you with questions after a few months, just when you assumed things must have gone well
One of the tells of an inexperienced engineer I use is how much they disparage the previous team's work.