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Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

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Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#211

Post by hash-set »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #121

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…

Have you ever had to deal with a bad worker, though? In one company where I was a tech lead we had a guy who did nothing. When I assigned him work, he turned in garbage that someone else had to re-do (often me, working at home). He would go out to his car after lunch and get stoned and then come back in and fall asleep at his desk!

On paper, the team had four developers, in reality, there was only three. It was a huge headache trying to explain to PMs and other managers why our team didn't really have the bandwidth it appeared to have.

I therefore complained to our manager about this guy. The response was long in coming and when it finally arrived, we were to place the non-worker on an "improvement plan" which was mandated by HR. That means I had to work even harder now because I had to put together said plan and basically try to micro-manage this guy while also re-doing all his code. The improvement plan didn't work. His output was just as bad as always. This went on and on for months. Mercifully, the guy was finally let go after almost a year of dicking around.

All of this somehow reflected badly on me, however! My manager didn't like that I "made waves" in the company by requiring this guy to do work. He also didn't like having to smooth over all the ruffled feathers among the other teams who couldn't understand why we were always behind schedule.

Stupid, bad management is to blame, not me.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#212

Post by user5994461 »

guitarbill wrote: post #123
bad_user wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though CS fundamentals and contributing in teams are somewhat different skills, in my experience the terrible developers that contribute negatively to the project tend to be those that do not have a good grasp of CS fundamentals. I mean, some problems we are faced with are very, very challenging and if somebody can't figure out how to reverse a binary tree or do a FizzBuzz, then what can he do? Also I'm hearing…

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 de…

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

Just an idea: Try increasing salary. Good CS grads already have people hiring them and they have a ton of debt to repay.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#213

Post by hash-set »

erkaes wrote: post #148
ThePhysicist wrote: post #121

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…

You are right but I also can understand his 'influential developer' negativity effect. In my place there's this one influential developer (the Team Lead) that can veto every decisions even though the others juniors/seniors under him already have consensus. He doesn't want the existing process to be altered. Now he's alone as everyone is leaving.

Had that happen, too. Had two tech leads over me who didn't want to learn anything new. One guy was in love with Apache Camel, the other, was just a J2EE guy from like the early 2000s. Frustrating.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#214

Post by hash-set »

sna1l wrote: post #32
userbinator wrote: post #28

An even more egregious form of negative work is a developer who is stuck using out of date programming practices AND has a large amount of influence at a company. At the other extreme is the developer who is so entranced by "newer is better" mentality that they rewrite everything in an attempt to conform to "latest best practices", increasing complexity massively while introducing a bunch of bugs and huge dependencie…

+1 to this. I used to work with a guy like that and it created a ton of tech debt. He would write new services using a new technology for each one, not to documenting or maintaining any of them.

Resume driven development.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#215

Post by bigato »

borplk wrote: post #181
bad_user wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though CS fundamentals and contributing in teams are somewhat different skills, in my experience the terrible developers that contribute negatively to the project tend to be those that do not have a good grasp of CS fundamentals. I mean, some problems we are faced with are very, very challenging and if somebody can't figure out how to reverse a binary tree or do a FizzBuzz, then what can he do? Also I'm hearing…

Junior people who are very good at CS often struggle with "real-world software". I had to explain to such a developer once why it was a bad idea to store multiple values into a single database column. It was a simple task of adding a few integer columns to a table but he couldn't let go of the "optimizations" in his mind about how he could use binary bits to represent what we wanted to represent and all that... A per…

If a guy does not understand the DB theory related to data normalization, I wouldn't call him good at CS. At least not DB related CS.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#216

Post by gbvb »

Without sounding like a curmudgeon, "An even more egregious form of negative work is a developer who is stuck using out of date programming practices AND has a large amount of influence at a company. " can happen when new developers come up with ways of re-writing applications without understanding the full problem statement or spending the time to understand the existing codebase. Usually, they might have worked on a small to medium sized projects and show up to work on a project with millions of lines of code with teams in different geographies and expect to change things across the board. When the same explanation has to be given the 15th time, you can turn into a toad and start saying "NO" first. :)

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#217

Post by user5994461 »

adekok wrote: post #169
lordnacho wrote: post #115

Good points. Regarding how such people come to influence, you have to remember a lot of people, especially in startups, are not hired through a process at all. I worked with a guy for many years who was as described in this article. He can't code and he can't do any math, despite holding a phd. He can talk about math and he can talk about code, but we're talking excel level skills when what you need is someone with a…

> First of all, the boss of the fund did not have the skills to judge who could write a trading strategy, and who couldn't. So he was stuck with recommendations from other people who also didn't have this skill, leading to this hire. Which is why it's important for managers to understand the technology that they're managing. I ran into this 25 years ago. I knew someone who went to an MBA school. He spoke up at a part…

> "No, because when you have a technical disagreement in the team, as manager, you have to make the final decision. And if you don't understand the issues, you're left deciding based on what, popularity of the engineers involved?"

And you've just done a mistake by forcing a decision.

You've got involved for a thing you didn't know and you didn't research. Right now, you're the least qualified people in the room to take that decision. You should have no say in it.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#218

Post by falsedan »

user5994461 wrote: post #198
falsedan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, if you know English and Latin, why not blog in Latin, since it makes no difference to your ability to enjoy your posts.

So, the question that makes the difference should whether he writes blog for himself or for his readers? [replace "blog" by "code"]

Anyone can read their blog! Since anyone can learn Latin, if they feel like it.

(Yes, I know I'm representing a terrible argument.)

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#219

Post by lkitching »

borplk wrote: post #181
bad_user wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though CS fundamentals and contributing in teams are somewhat different skills, in my experience the terrible developers that contribute negatively to the project tend to be those that do not have a good grasp of CS fundamentals. I mean, some problems we are faced with are very, very challenging and if somebody can't figure out how to reverse a binary tree or do a FizzBuzz, then what can he do? Also I'm hearing…

Junior people who are very good at CS often struggle with "real-world software". I had to explain to such a developer once why it was a bad idea to store multiple values into a single database column. It was a simple task of adding a few integer columns to a table but he couldn't let go of the "optimizations" in his mind about how he could use binary bits to represent what we wanted to represent and all that... A per…

I wouldn't say someone who's never heard of first normal form has 'good CS fundamentals'.

Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work

#220

Post by [deleted] »

soVeryTired wrote: post #118
lordnacho wrote: post #115

Good points. Regarding how such people come to influence, you have to remember a lot of people, especially in startups, are not hired through a process at all. I worked with a guy for many years who was as described in this article. He can't code and he can't do any math, despite holding a phd. He can talk about math and he can talk about code, but we're talking excel level skills when what you need is someone with a…

I work in finance and I've seen the same thing happen. I guess it's more common than people realise.

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