I think the hardest part of joining a new company as a Senior Software Engineer, is taking that first step to confidently approve Pull requests.

You have to feel confident in your knowledge of the code base, the architecture used, the libraries used in the project, and the team’s coding standard. You also know that one Approval means the code makes it’s way into the main code base and will go to production…. Being confident enough to do this is scary!

And then of course you know the Lead will check the code anyway, and if you approved something that was blatantly incorrect, you really feel you let the team down.

But once you have the confidence to start approving, your contributions to the team are increased significantly as you make the code flow faster, and you take some of the load off the Lead.