The senior developer above me is like this for me, and it’s rough because it shakes my self esteem AND often leads to me having to support and extend a fragile and changing 3rd party library to solve a rather specific problem that would be better solved with custom code.
Where it really stings is when I do something of my own initiative (like, for example, create a transparent API over memoizing and caching some expensive calculation, or refactor some of our common client customizations into their own set of classes so it’s easier to extend) and he ignores it or scoffs at it.
Only to then find a third party library that implements something similarly. THEN it’s presented to me as a “brilliant idea” that we can take advantage of.
At that point, when I say “we” already do this, he usually rephrases what his brilliant 3rd party library does, as though he can’t fathom that I would be capable of doing something like that myself, and clearly I’m just not understanding what he’s telling me.
I think it’s a defensive mechanism for his ego against one of his peers or employees being more capable than he is.
But it’s also not like he can’t learn this stuff himself, he just doesn’t ever put in the time or effort.
