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Does Not Work

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31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Does Not Work

#31

Post by skeoh »

> The phrase “does not work” should be reserved for when you’re taking your car to the mechanic and you don’t have a clue what’s wrong with it.

I might suggest that the phrase "does not work" is as irritating to mechanics as it is to programmers. "Don't have a clue what's wrong with it" is clearly not the case if you are taking a car to a mechanic in the first place -- you surely have _some_ idea of what's wrong with it.

Certainly applies to other professions as well. As a rule of thumb, please help others help you.

Re: Does Not Work

#32

Post by LeicaLatte »

Teaching a lesson is always unnecessary and is often conflated with teaching itself. Some of the bad team leads I work with do this. Some people are simply incapable of teaching and have to rationalize it by enforcing protocols about how one programmer has to approach another. I have always found it inhuman.

Re: Does Not Work

#33

Post by ehnto »

bastawhiz wrote: post #13
Tade0 wrote: post #4

> If you are experiencing a problem of the nature of one of the first two in that list (does not compile or has a run-time exception), then somewhere, you’ve got an error message or an exception, and probably even a line number. Thing is, in this particular project I'm in - most of the time - you don't. Since our project is an in-browser text editor most of our bugs occur because the browser did something unexpected,…

Browser WYSIWYG editors are full of dragons. I'd give you that exception.

Which is amazing since it's a problem we have been trying to solve for more than a decade. I figure we just can't solve it fast enough to keep up with browser features and bitrot.

I once built a wysiwyg editor that utilized drag and drop for dynamic page content. Native browser drag and drop is an utter mess.

Re: Does Not Work

#34

Post by caconym_ »

conradev wrote: post #27

> When programmers come to me and simply say “this code does not work,” I send them away. Their problem is not solvable by me or anyone. When people come to me and say that, I ask "in what way doesn't it work?" and figure out how to help them.

Yeah.

I feel like if you really are working with people who are total caricatures of cargo-culting code monkeys, and you see yourself as a Guru holding court and suffering the wailing of ignorant petitioners only so long as they are able to dig deep within themselves and attempt to rise to Your level for the duration of the conversation, you have only yourself to blame. Blogs posted from high horseback are just masturbation (who knows, maybe you secretly like being surrounded by people who don't make you feel challenged).

In more reasonable language... if you have put yourself in the position of being the most senior or most effective employee on your team by a very wide margin, you are going to have this sort of experience. You can either try to help the more junior/less effective folks improve themselves, or go find something else, or just put up with it.

Re: Does Not Work

#35

Post by badminton1 »

mastre_ wrote: post #12

Cuts both ways tho. There are developers (some good, most not) who are notorious about not testing their code. "I don't know dude, it doesn't seem to work -- did you test it?" is fair game in these cases, especially once a pattern has been established. As in, why don't you look into it and figure out why it doesn't work instead of asking me to do it for you? As in, letme-not-googlethatforyou. Of course, depending on…

Yes. I have seen developers like that. It is not a very good career choice, as nobody wants to work with them. I personally call it spoonfeeding.

Re: Does Not Work

#36

Post by hoozter »

conradev wrote: post #27

> When programmers come to me and simply say “this code does not work,” I send them away. Their problem is not solvable by me or anyone. When people come to me and say that, I ask "in what way doesn't it work?" and figure out how to help them.

"When someone understand a little less about a computer language than me, I look down on this individual and act like an asshole. I am proud of this."

- tiny little meaningless creature on a stone somewhere in universe

Re: Does Not Work

#37

Post by gouggoug »

chris_overseas wrote: post #3

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. I know competent developers who interrupt me and simply say "X doesn't work". For the most part I appreciate that they're just using the phrase as a conversation starter and they do have more context to share. But why not share it in the first place? I either have to wait for them to elaborate, or ask for more information. Either way, the verbal dance just prolongs the interruption f…

I am hugely frustrated by this as well.

I often am interrupted by coworkers simply telling me "it doesn't work". Despite repeatably asking to be given more context from the get go, I am still regularly facing the "it doesn't work. dot. end of sentence.".

My answer often ends up being a clearly annoyed "Yes and so...??" hinting my interlocutor that I'm expecting more, and quickly. This is unfortunate since my annoyance can now be felt by the coworker in question, and potentially other people in the room.

This interaction happens as much in spoken conversation as it does in chats.

To add insult to injury, often times the reason why "it doesn't work" is contained in an error message that wasn't carefully (if at all) read.

I recently had to get up and go to the desk of one of my coworker telling me "it doesn't work". They were trying to connect to our MySQL server using a common macOS GUI client. Upon arriving at their desk I immediately knew what the problem was. I was baffled and frustrated that someone supposedly competent made me get up for this: "Unable to connect to host 172.20.0.100 because access was denied.

Double-check your username and password and ensure that access from your current location is permitted.

MySQL said: Access denied for user 'admin'@'172.20.0.1' (using password: YES)". I had to ask my coworker to read the message out loud, only then did he realize his mistake (it doesn't work, because the password is wrong...).

Although this example is extreme, my day to day life is made of many, less extreme, instances of this kind of interaction that are wasting my time. A benign as it can seem, this contributes a lot to my stress and frustration.

Re: Does Not Work

#38

Post by pepijndevos »

> If you’re telling a programmer that a particular piece of source code simply “does not work”, then you should no longer consider yourself a programmer.

I found this article unnecessarily rude. Sounds like someone got grumpy after answering too many SO posts. I agree with what others have said: If someone says that, either they are inexperienced and you can teach them some useful debugging skills, or their brain is on fire and you could try to be more helpful than sending them away.

Re: Does Not Work

#40

Post by indifferentalex »

I think this applies to cofounders and employers/bosses as well, if you're the programmer and they are non-technical, and they come to you and simply state "someone tried to do this thing and it didn't work" without giving you anything to debug with, view it as a huge red flag indicating that they do not, and do not want to, understand or appreciate your work and your time.

I've had this happen to me and after asking politely multiple times, and explaining the need for communicating in a detailed and useful manner (that I demonstrated), I would end up just getting angry when it would continue to happen.

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