You prepare for the sessions. You think about what to explain, what to show them, which of your old mistakes is worth telling. That preparation is worth something, and it is not where most of the teaching happens.
Most of it happens in the twenty minutes they spend watching you get contradicted in a design review.
Somebody newer than you is trying to work out what is normal here, and they have almost no data of their own, so they use the nearest example. That is you. They notice how long you stay annoyed after a hard review. They notice whether you argued with the person or with the point. They notice whether you said out loud that you were wrong, or went quiet and shipped your version anyway three days later. They notice what you say about the platform team when the platform team is not in the room, and a throwaway line from you becomes their settled opinion for two years.
None of that is in your plan for the session, and all of it is being recorded.
So narrate yourself occasionally. After a tense meeting, give it three minutes with them. Here is what I was worried about, here is why I let that one go, here is the reply I drafted and deleted. The reasoning is the part they cannot see, and without it they only get the behaviour and have to guess at the cause.
Do not perform a calm you do not have, either. Saying that a review stung and you needed an hour before answering is far more useful than modelling a serenity nobody actually possesses. What you are showing them is not that senior people are unbothered. It is what you do with being bothered.
And be careful with the small things, because those travel furthest. How you talk about support. Whether you read the whole ticket. Whether you thank the person who found the bug or the person who fixed it.
They will forget most of what you told them deliberately. They will still be using your reactions long after they have forgotten where they picked them up.
– Asael Shinder
