why you should answer junior devs questions right now.
Reasons to answer their question right now.
- You're going to sound very standoffish if you enforce some cold 30min contract with them. Tells them, you don't really want to answer their questions, your time is more valuable then theirs.
- You're going to create a culture of, "we've gone through the painful initiation process, you do too". Spoiler alert: you don't want this.
- Your time is much better spent getting another engineer as good as you than trying to preserve your time as a single engineer. If you trained 9 other engineers you could 10x yourself.
- Their questions are probably going to help you see flaws in your code and documentation. See these as UX problems rather that problems of more trying hard enough. That way you're less likely to ever get the question again.
Don't assume that people's intentions are bad. I believe that everyone wants to be good contributors, and it's our job to help them.