Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

Considering that the author writes on his resume that he lead several teams, it startles me a bit to see how easily he puts all the blame on the developer and none on the other team members (including him) and the management.

The way I see it, as a senior developer or team lead it is your job to make sure that your junior level programmers are doing good work, and if they don't, you either help them to improve or (if that's not possible) let them go. Whenever I hear a story like "this person did bad work for six months so we had to delete all his code changes and let him go" I immediately know that something is very wrong with the management of the software project in question, as in a good team structure it's just not possible that a single person does "negative work" for several months, let alone a year without being noticed.

Also, whether a developer will do good or bad work does not only depend on his/her ability, but also on the circumstances under which he/she works. Some people need more oversight and a tighter feedback loop to be productive, while others can work in a more independent way. In any case, with a good team process it is really hard for a single person to do negative work, and if it happens it's usually the fault of at least several people (due to lack of clear standards, missing feedback cycles or lack of ownership).

So if you're a senior developer or team lead, don't put the blame on other programmers, but instead ask yourself how you can build a process that makes it really hard for individual programmers to do bad work.

It's hilarious, because our best hires are people who had no CS education. Meanwhile, some of the worst hires were CS grads.

Things that are hard to teach: Can you work in a team, especially if some of them are remote workers? Can you leave your ego behind? Can you deal with the corporate BS that gets in the way of programming? Can you think of the user, use-cases, business value, etc of the feature/product you're developing? Can you digest technical information?

Things that are not hard to teach: CS fundamentals, programming (given a basic understanding of logic).

I won't go as far as to say a CS education is harmful, but it isn't a good indicator, either. Personally, I find CS, in trying to validate itself as a "science" (which it is not, no scientific method, just like maths isn't science, but still valuable), makes stuff over-complicated and relies on terminology far too much.

And by focussing on it, you lose a huge pool of potential applicants.

scss was what we used I am sure any decent source control system can handle your Pl/SQl or what have you.

I've been in this job long enough to know that there is no silver bullet in tech stack, methodology, technique, etc. Yet, it took me a while to get there and even if I did it means nothing because wherever I look I see S/W houses being governed by adherents of the this or that 'true religion'. I think that most of that is just cargo cults - i.e. what happens to work for this company (and whereupon people there believe in) is taken to be the way to go for any other company/product/case.

Are SPs bad/evil/nice/safe/etc? I don't know and I cannot tell unless we are talking about something concrete. Senior devs were saying a few years ago that they are the holy grail. Senior devs are saying now that they are the devil. Go figure.

Is TDD the holy grail? Dunno - these days TDD seems to be synonymous to progress and modernity. Any opposed view seem to belong to cavemen but wasn't that so with OOP just a few months before functional became the way to go?

Anyway - you catch my drift. I'm doubly cautious when I hear people speak with the greatest conviction about this and that these days unless they are speaking off a concrete example.

> let them go

Erm, that isn't how corporations work. First, team lead doesn't mean manager, and even then in some companies, first and second line have very little to say. HR needs to be involved, etc. Which creates more work. There are the people who simply don't care. Contractors on a gravy train or outsourced people. I've been there, there is nothing you can do in this case.

I think it's fair to say from your resume/LinkedIn that you have been shielded from such effects for most of your career. Consider that a blessing, but don't assume you always have so much control over your environment. A lot of us are more like mercenaries, making good money out of bad situations while we can.