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Why your programmers just want to code

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Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#81

Post by crdoconnor »

toyg wrote: post #54
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 a…

I've worked with programmers who have specialized and stayed in one (non-tech) industry for long periods in their career and they're often behind on the tech and lack the benefit of cross fertilization of ideas from other industries.

That might be the right trade off if the domain knowledge is a lot more valuable than the benefits of the newer tech, but it's still a trade off.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#82

Post by humanrebar »

> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.”

To be fair, part of an engineer's job is to give her opinion on when you're not building the right thing because you're building the right thing in the wrong way.

Building something with 10-100X more cost, unacceptable bug rates, or a pivot-unfriendly design means losing money in many (most?) contexts.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#83

Post by JoeAltmaier »

humanrebar wrote: post #82

> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” To be fair, part of an engineer's job is to give her opinion on when you're not building the right thing because you're building the right thing in the wrong way. Building something with 10-100X more cost, unacceptable bug rates, or a pivot-unfriendly design means losing money in m…

It can always be debugged in the next sprint! Just pick up another item from the board and keep coding; if we get behind we'll just hire some more college grads.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #77
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…

I usually am totally in line with your insights, but not today? Perhaps our viewpoints on this issue are colored by our history and current situation. I for one am on a contract that's exactly as called out in the OP. Been on the job for 2 months (today), and have precisely one line of useful code contributed to the code base. Not for lack of trying; I've written a lot but its all been rejected out of hand for not be…

> Perhaps our viewpoints on this issue are colored by our history and current situation.

Might be.

I'm not disagreeing with the article about how programmers can be completely discouraged by the treatment they (or you here) described. Maybe I shouldn't have jumped straight to ignoring the core point and commenting on everything else that the article said, that I believe exemplifies pathological issues that hurt the culture in the company.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#85

Post by PeachPlum »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #56
PeachPlum wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do totally understand that motivation, coding is enjoyable. I have lots of code on github that I wrote that no-one has ever run since the time I checked it in once it worked.

But the PHP code I wrote that was getting 1m pageviews a month gave more of a sense of achievement than my clever raytracer.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#86

Post by m_fayer »

mindw0rk wrote: post #75
m_fayer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a chefs career progresses, they start to want to develop recipes, work out how to cook them effectively and then teach the juniors, develop the menu, pick the ingredients and vendors, and even help with the layout of the restaurant. What they want to do less and less is spend all day chopping and frying.

But before that they make sure that they have opened their own restaurants.

Good point.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#87

Post by hobs »

wffurr wrote: post #79
hobs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Having a job is not even close to a "stake in the business". If you want me to act like I have a stake in the business, give me a stake in the business . To be clear, that's stock with dividends and voting rights. Something like democratic control over the workplace would do wonders for morale. Then managers answer to the body of employees as a whole, not the "boss."

Sounds like you should start a business. You absolutely have a stake in terms of your paycheck, is it as great a stake as you would like? No.

Are plenty of people happy with that kind of stake? Absolutely.

Do you need to get paid in stock to get paid well? No, in fact in many cases its gambling with market forces you simply cannot control.

I dont mean to say you should burn your life for a business, but if you simply dont care because "I am a programmer and I dont need to" imho your general effectiveness is going to be low, your skill progression isnt going to be fast, and your chance of getting hired somewhere with equity that isnt a shitshow is also low.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#88

Post by tetron »

Some of these responses speak to the difference between "programming" and "software engineering". If you want people to hack code without regard for what it is for, you get programmers. If you want a team that is fully engaged in building a product (which means the whole life cycle from requirements to deployment) you need software engineers. If you disempower developers from that kind of decision making, it doesn't matter what their title is.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#89

Post by hobs »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
hobs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Well, you do have to give a shit. But giving a shit about doing a good, honest job, is not the same as believing the business or the product. It's like this saying - one should be able to understand an opinion without believing in it. Similarly, one can put their best, honest effort working on a product while at the same time believing the product is generally pointless and waste of space on the market. (Of course if…

Yes, this is what I would call Professionalism.

I think its quite hard to do that for a long period though, if you truly dont believe in the product and are only working for the paycheck, apathy is going to set in fairly fast.

If you can find pieces of it you can be proud of and care about, you can maintain sanity.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#90

Post by notyourday »

humanrebar wrote: post #66
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem many programmers face, is that for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have. So of course, some find it easier just to code away without having to deal with other humans. Personally, I get bored to death on the projects where I happen to be a lone dev.

> ...for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have... Only because technical decision making is poorly structured in most organizations. Or it's clear but evaluation of decisions and decision-makers is poor. If it were: - get feedback from these N ...it wouldn't matter so much that Engineer McCodeface wasn't the best at attending happy hours, back-scratching, etc.

This only works if your organization actually hired at a certain minimum level of competency from EngineerMcCodeface[1..100]. In a hospital interns opinions do not carry the weight of residents, residents opinions do not carry weight of the attendings, and attending opinions do not carry weight of a Chief of Surgery.
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