Love Mentoring, Hate Code Reviews

One of my roles in my work is that I get to do both mentoring and code reviews; both of these are feedback to my junior colleagues. Mentoring usually happens in the form of a casual conversation about some problem my juniors have been working on. I get to steer them towards things that I think will help them be successful. I love doing that. Code Reviews on the other hand is a lot more like grading papers. They've done the work and now I have to tell them what they've done wrong and to go fix it. I don't like to be harsh but some just don't "get it" and probably never will. It's interesting to me that the ones that seek the advice upfront (mentoring) end up doing much better work than the ones that just jump in and ask for feedback at the end. Advice is better than criticism.