As a team lead, I’ve found it really difficult to keep curious, smart, young engineers on track. Everyone wants to go off and build shiny things instead of solving real problems. I have to find enough shiny problems that actually need solving to balance out the daily grind. Interestingly, I also find it difficult to instill a sense of meticulousness, and how important it is to write code in a way that reduces bugs. Clever engineers come up with clever, complicated solutions that are written quickly and rely on coincidence to function. Life experience is the best teacher for this, but I often need to step in. I’m still not sure what the balance is there.