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Why your programmers just want to code

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Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#51

Post by nickthemagicman »

jdowner wrote: post #42

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and…

Holy lord thank you.

When did it become incumbent on devs to come up with the entire business process as well?

I feel like I'm here to code your ideas, not come up with the ideas and processes as well as code them.

It's literally plain and clear at that point how pointless management and buisiness is in those situations

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#52

Post by zzzcpan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I nee…

It would be strange for a programmer as an employee to care about the business or the product, given that he has to work for a living and has no stake in any of it. It seems to be a common misunderstanding, unicorn employees that want to care about the business don't actually exist, but a lot are willing to lie about it of course.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#53

Post by alain_gilbert »

crdoconnor wrote: post #12

>But, two years later, Jamie was “that guy”. You know, the one who wants to code without being bothered. >I should have noticed the signs. He didn’t speak up in retrospectives, he didn’t contribute process or product ideas like I expected, and his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. I suspect if…

You said something that reach me so much: "tooling".

I sometime feels like if you don't have good tools, it's almost impossible for the employees to be productive or motivated.

I often see some people working in the most unproductive way possible (to my eyes) that it actually discourage me. I'm left wondering how they can even get anything done when spending so much time doing simple tasks.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#54

Post by toyg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I nee…

> You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring

Er, I suspect this would make it impossible to staff 90% of positions in programming. If I thought a business were exciting, I would be a specialist in that business, not in programming - or I'd be a very lousy 9-to-5 programmer, because my passion lies elsewhere.

Very few companies have the luxury of hiring passionate programmers who are also interested in making the business succeed; most of them just want their payroll system chugging along and someone to sort out their Excel when it breaks.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#55

Post by AllegedAlec »

rovek wrote: post #38
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…

> including developers in the design review process I was banging this drum for 2 years at my previous employer. I was always told it's a great idea but the people who knew projects were coming down the line just never reached out to the tech team. We are all tech consumers, letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the…

> letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the possible.

Pretty much this. We consistently get screwed over on our schedules because designers just throw a design over our way without asking us for any input along the way.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#56

Post by Aaargh20318 »

PeachPlum wrote: post #44
paulhilbert wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conte…

Does it not bring you any pleasure for your users to find your work valuable ? We could all just sit at home and write code all day. but without users there is no point. The situation describe in the OP is a result of a poor management culture, which is why it's there.

> We could all just sit at home and write code all day. but without users there is no point.

Depends on how you are motivated. Speaking for myself, my motivation always comes from myself, never from what others think of my work. The users/paying customers aren't the point, at best they are an enabler, allowing me to spend more time coding that I would otherwise have to waste by having a non-coding job.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#57

Post by hobs »

zzzcpan wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I nee…

It would be strange for a programmer as an employee to care about the business or the product, given that he has to work for a living and has no stake in any of it. It seems to be a common misunderstanding, unicorn employees that want to care about the business don't actually exist, but a lot are willing to lie about it of course.

How do you make something better if you dont give a shit? It's not only not strange, its pretty much a job requirement to recognize your job is the stake in the business.

Every single programming job I have had has required me to care enough about the product and the business to understand, interpret, and implement things that the business wanted but couldnt fully articulate.

That being said, if the business wants you to be both the business and the programmer, they have a broken system and are failing to manage properly

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#58

Post by firepoet »

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.

I'd say 40% of the time of my career I've been in a place where my ideas were valued and I felt like "part of the team" as a programmer, and later as a programmer/manager. Those places I stayed the longest. They make up 15% of the number of companies I've worked for (my résumé has a lot of places on it..ha!).

The rest of the places I was beaten down, much like the programmer in this story. Unlike that developer, though, as soon as I started to feel like the only skill I was valued for was raw programming I started looking for another job.

Good leadership is so hard to find!

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#59

Post by whack »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I nee…

You've missed the context and the point of the article. The author is specifically speaking about employees who are full of ideas at the outset, but withdraw into their shells after a couple months. The problem the author is trying to address, is that of would-be enthusiastic employees becoming disengaged because their ideas are not given a fair-hearing. This really resonated with me, because even as someone who's motivated to make an impact, I've personally experienced it in the past. The points you're making are valid, but completely orthogonal to the article.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#60

Post by firepoet »

watwut wrote: post #34
ndh2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience with code review is that code reviewer is the one holding the power and refuses to accept code until it does what customer did not wanted. If you have position without checks, including code reviewing, it will be abused.

This is an unfortunate experience. The best environments I've seen have a core value of respect for others, and code reviews exist to benefit not just the customer but also future programmers (which also ultimately benefits the customer but in more indirect ways, such as reducing cost of change). The absolute best are the ones where the reviewer is giving advice, but can't hold back integration. Much less threatening circumstance. More collaborative.
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