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Why your programmers just want to code

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Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#91

Post by notyourday »

firepoet wrote: post #58
icebraining wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thou…

... which is why my position is HTTP 402 "PAY ME AND I WILL SCREW A LIGHT BULB"

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#92

Post by JoeAltmaier »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Right; I'm of a similar opinion on that part. Philosophers have always thought we needed a philosopher king; military types want a General for president; businesspeople want a merchant king. Conversely, team leads think everybody on the team should know what they do.

We need a leader that can lead. Can enable the team to progress. Without asking them all to understand the details of the goals (business plan; budget negotiations etc).

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#93

Post by thisisit »

Wow. This article really resonated with me. I was "Jamie" until 2 months ago.

I choose my jobs very carefully. So when this company had a reputation of hiring the best, I was beyond excited. The interview process was great. I really liked interacting with the (future) manager.

And....things went downhill in the very first month. In the first team meeting VP announced that the manager was moving on. All the while I could see it was not mutual agreement between the manager and VP. But, I thought that was not my problem.

A meeting was set with the new manager and there it dawned to me that I was in huge trouble. The new guy wanted me to do a presentation in front of the VP and other C-level executives. "But I am not aware of the project requirements" I said. He summarily ignored my objections.

On landing in front of the VP and C-level people I was criticised for not knowing the project requirements. While the old manager tried to help me, the new guy kept his mouth shut.

Later the new manager offered me a half ass apology. That proved to be the last straw and I became the person who just wanted to code.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#94

Post by lbill »

TL;DR: I lived this situation on a shitty firm. It's depressing. But "good" firms do exist, don't lose hope!

I lived this situation : I got hired as a developer and got involved into making the product better and improving our processes. But the firm was (and still is) utter shit. It was painful and I was unhappy.

Some people there are still trying to do a good job and they have had several episodes of burn-out. Some other just lowered their standard and accept to get paid to poop some ugly code and apply useless processes (some might be happy, but most of them are dead inside). I just gave up on this nonsense and quit, and was lucky enough to find a much better place. My new firm (not that "new", it's been more than a year now) is not perfect and can definitely be improved... But motivation and commitment into improving things are actually welcome, and it works!

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#95

Post by humanrebar »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #83
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.

"Will this feature be profitable if it requires X more engineers per Y users?"

If the answer is yes, then I guess it's fine.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#96

Post by humanrebar »

notyourday wrote: post #90
humanrebar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

Also a good point.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#97

Post by thisisit »

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…

> So, stop blaming Jamie and start making the changes that your culture demands. The sooner, the better.

This is the last line in the article. So I am wondering what led to the conclusion that this article blames stuff on the programmer?

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#98

Post by forgottenpass »

hobs wrote: post #87
wffurr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You absolutely have a stake in terms of your paycheck [...] Are plenty of people happy with that kind of stake? Absolutely.

That "stake" is a product of how good the employer is relative to others, how hard it is to find another job and the job market for the position in general. I don't begrudge people for being happy with that. I am one of them. But a first order approximation of this "stake" can be summed up as "no stake."

Sounds like you should start a business.

Whether the parent poster should start a business is irrelevant to whether or not it's bullshit to ask/expect employees to be motivated as if they have a larger material stake in the business than they do.

Re: Why your programmers just want to code

#99

Post by JoeAltmaier »

humanrebar wrote: post #95
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Will this feature be profitable if it requires X more engineers per Y users?" If the answer is yes, then I guess it's fine.

Until the code base becomes so intractable, such a dinosaur of brittle features and run-on code that nothing significant can be done without exhaustive debugging. Then no group is large enough to make good progress.

Loose wads of code with random dependencies make the effort grow geometrically. No growth in team membership can keep up with that for long. The only solution is to tightly control dependencies, write good abstractions and keep to them religiously, etc.

So many, many projects head off this particular cliff. They pretend to have life for a while, reducing the feature set in each drop to smaller and smaller items. Relabelling a bug fix a feature, and features overrun the sprint/release and get relabeled 'bugs' so you can keep developing through the test and release phases.

So many of us recognize the syndrome. But so little gets done about it, especially in large companies.

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