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Why your programmers just want to code

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Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#21

Post by icebraining »

w_t_payne wrote: post #4

The programmer in this story has realised this fundamental truth: The spoken word is ephemeral and easily forgot. The design of the product that pays the bills is not so easily undone. What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. When it comes to what actually gets implemented — all of…

Besides scandox's comment, where do you work that you can actually do that and get away with it? Where I've worked, a programmer who did that might get to decide a few things unilaterally, but not for long.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#22

Post by downvote_me »

There is a huge amount of insight on this post and I could not upvote this story enough. It is exactly the onboarding process and all the BS/political powerplay and non-productive rhetorics that pass that exact message to a programmer. Multiply this by ten if you happen to be a non-native developer in a mostly ethnic company where your language skills are below native. So -even though it is never clearly said in the open- the message gets to be 'you are just a "foreign" code monkey'.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#23

Post by paulhilbert »

ndh2 wrote: post #19
paulhilbert wrote: post #7

"It’s only natural, then, that your programmer is reduced to doing only what brings him success: coding." Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...

Oh, wow. Care to elaborate? I found the entire article so relatable that I even thought about registering on Medium to be able to clap.

I spent most of my day coding. Except for some fresh air breaks and occasional discussions on how to collaborate I actually spend every second doing it. And I love it. The article suggests in its whole premise that this is wrong. For me and for the business. Yet it lacks any evidence on why I should want to do more than that - in fact I would even call it blindly dogmatic in that regard.

But at least in my work context I think that my boss's job is to keep me from customers and design decisions as much as possible - since that is what I love and what yields the most productive use of my time. I wonder why my joiner friends aren't told that spending all day in their workshop creating beautiful wooden art is wrong and that they should instead derive more pleasure from interactions with their customers...

Maybe in an ideal world someone who cries over every line of code since she/he would much rather make design decisions but is left out of the creativity loop just isn't a natural coder. Just like someone who hates working with wood maybe shouldn't.

I am well aware that this is a position of extremes and blocks out the gray areas that are reality. But my work reality is just not what this "Hacker, Problem Solver, Calvinist, Geek" regards as the very premise of his manager lesson.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#25

Post by ndh2 »

icebraining wrote: post #21
w_t_payne wrote: post #4

The programmer in this story has realised this fundamental truth: The spoken word is ephemeral and easily forgot. The design of the product that pays the bills is not so easily undone. What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. When it comes to what actually gets implemented — all of…

Besides scandox's comment, where do you work that you can actually do that and get away with it? Where I've worked, a programmer who did that might get to decide a few things unilaterally, but not for long.

This happens if your superior doesn't critically evaluate anybody's work, and there are no code reviews. So if there's no feedback culture. At my company, my superior sometimes writes emails regarding commits, but since he doesn't write that down (waiting-for list in GTD) I figured that I can simply ignore the emails, and nothing happens. The result is cowboy coding.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#26

Post by pipio21 »

As someone who has been programmer and now hires lots of programmers, there are things in life you can't buy, like love, or in this case, respect.

I learned motorola assembler, then intel's when I was a kid and have been programming all my life,studied engineering and made a software company from scratch.

Programmers respect me in a way they do not respect an MBA, no matter the title or the money they have. In a company it is a big problem.

You can't see it, it is invisible but man you could sense it, it is a very strong force.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#27

Post by PythonJay »

badminton1 wrote: post #6

How would you feel if: - you were a chef. you went to culinary school and know about cooking and best practices. - you are asked to forget everything you learned in school and flip burgers with overly reused oil and unwashed equipment. - you are told that there's no time to clean the kitchen, or wash your hands. just flip as many burgers as possible to maximize profit. - the ones that cook the most burgers are reward…

I created an account to agree with you. That's a great way of putting it.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#28

Post by AllegedAlec »

This hits a little too close to home for me.

I cannot count the number of times per that one of the following situations has happened:

- I go to our designers with an inconsistency, omission or even an outright contradiction in the design just to hear that this is how it was designed and that the client approved this design, so we should implement it precisely as the design says.

- Development is slowed down/held back by technical debt and odd implementation choices. When I suggest we fix this, I get told that fixing what isn't broken doesn't earn us money, so I should work around it for now.

- I have a suggestion for some process improvement (for example: developer post-mortems, including developers in the design review process), to get told that it's already been tried at some point in the past (usually back in the really early days of the company when there were less than 5 employees) and that it didn't work back then, which means that it will never work, no matter how much has changed since then.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#29

Post by m_fayer »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #28

This hits a little too close to home for me. I cannot count the number of times per that one of the following situations has happened: - I go to our designers with an inconsistency, omission or even an outright contradiction in the design just to hear that this is how it was designed and that the client approved this design, so we should implement it precisely as the design says. - Development is slowed down/held bac…

That's just a bad company you're working for, it absolutely does not have to be this bad.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#30

Post by megaman22 »

It's not just programming; anything where your thoughts and concerns are automatically dismissed and shoved aside becomes incredibly demoralizing. Eventually you either give up completely, or you settle into the tiny corner where you're allowed to have opinions and act on them.
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