Wasn’t even a code review, just a regular sync. He was maybe six months in, fresh out of a bootcamp, still a little nervous when talking. But he looked at the logic I had written and asked, “Why do we do it this way?”

And I froze.

Because I didn’t have an answer I liked. The truth was, I didn’t remember. It had always been done that way. I had absorbed it, carried it forward, optimized around it. But I had stopped asking why.

That moment stayed with me. Not because he exposed some huge flaw, but because he reminded me of something I didn’t realize I had lost: the habit of questioning defaults.

It happens more often than you’d think. You spend years learning the trade, accumulating patterns, refining instinct. But the more you know, the more you risk assuming. That’s where juniors come in, not just to learn, but to help us remember how to learn.

A few months ago, another new dev was pairing with me on a legacy form component. I was walking through the structure, “this connects to that, this triggers a fetch, that disables the button”, and he just said, “Isn’t this three different responsibilities in one place?”

Again: silence on my end. He wasn’t proposing a solution, just noticing. And he was right. We’d duct-taped new behavior onto old logic so many times, it had become second nature. He didn’t have that baggage. His eyes were clean.

It’s not that juniors are always right, no one is. It’s that they’re unfiltered. They see the thing as it is, not as we’ve learned to justify it. That’s invaluable.

And it makes you reflect, how often do we over-identify with our experience? How often do we mistake familiarity for wisdom?

I used to think mentorship was mostly about teaching. Now I think the best mentors are the ones who stay teachable.

That shift, from authority to co-explorer, makes all the difference. You stop trying to impress, and start trying to connect. You stop defending every line you’ve written, and start inviting questions.

Because the real growth isn’t in having all the answers.

It’s in knowing when to say, “Huh. Good point.”