A fellow Drupal community member messaged me last week asking which habits take you from intermediate to advanced. I gave the boring, honest answer: talk to your stakeholders properly, be reliable, and solve things fast. Immediately if you can; patch your own work later if you have to.
But I sat with the message afterwards, because it is the first one like it I have had in a long while.
Then I did the maths on the Drupal people around me.
Nobody in that circle is starting out. Everyone has grey in the beard or the beginnings of it. The youngest person I regularly work with has been doing this for eight years.
Who maintains this in 2036?
Drupal got hard. Not bad, hard. The days when a curious teenager could build something real with Views and CCK and be writing modules two years later are behind us, and we have not replaced that path with anything. Yet.
So this is on us, the ones who already know how it works.
Answer the question in the issue queue instead of linking the documentation and walking away. Review the junior's patch properly, and remember the first one is terrifying to submit. Put their name on the commit. Let them present at the local event even if you could do it better, especially if you could do it better.
Take the call. Reply to the message. It costs you fifteen minutes and it is the difference between someone staying in this or drifting off to whichever framework was nicer to them.
And if you are earlier in this than I am: there is a wide-open lane and almost nobody in it. My inbox is open, just as it was for them.
Stop making people feel stupid for asking what a hook is. We all asked.