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Comment by tiddles | Hacker News Reader

I’ve come across junior colleagues who latch on to some "best practice" that they read/heard about, then preach it to anyone who will listen and aggressively debate it to death, instead of actually getting any work done.

The solution is to ignore these "my thing is objectively better than yours in 100% of cases" debates - choose the pattern/design/paradigm/thing with the least compromises and do something productive :-)

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For the juniors on my team, the next question I always ask after the answer "it's best practice" is always "why is it best practice?"

It's fundamentally important to understand why something is best practice, so that you know when it is not the best course of action.

Seniors can make the same mistake - I had one literally senior colleague argue that he's been coding for decades longer than I have (I was only coding for ~15 years at the time) and that I should just do as he says, but would not tell me why, or how that applied to the situation.

Definitely. I even had the previous lead developer at $work love to say that things were best practice without really giving much justification - it's fuelled my quest for 'why?' a great deal :)

There should be a rule 0: work, don't talk.

Usually when people are focused on working and working together fast, the converge on pragmatic efficient solutions.

Of course 'together' is subtle here ..

"less talk, more rock" is how one of my colleagues put it.

The comment section on HN would become much easier to read if that was applied!

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