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Mine wanted to get paid. Can you imagine it? Building the best product ever just wasn't enough. P45's all round and the issue was solved, permanently.
For non-UK readers: according to Wikipedia, P45 is slang for firing an employee.
Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common? My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.
From the business side, here are examples I've seen:
- Have to use this technology, everything else is old, anachronistic, and unperformant
- System has to be scaled this way from the start (in startups, often, no it doesn't)
- Tension in how you trade off new features with clean code (there's a balance, and each environment requires a diff tradeoff)
- Building feature a certain way because it's easier for them, while ignoring what's appropriate for the customer/user
- Unwillingness or inability to explain technical topics to non-technical audience
- Making decisions solely on technical appropriateness, rather than broader appropriateness for the company (say, availability of other engineers to work on it)
There's lots on the managerial and business side too, but I'll save that for another thread.
P.S. A favorite quote of mine from Chinua Achebe (old proverb): Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Any group we spend our time around will show itself in a good light. Even more so when we are a member of that group.
Mine wanted to get paid. Can you imagine it? Building the best product ever just wasn't enough. P45's all round and the issue was solved, permanently.
For non-UK readers: according to Wikipedia, P45 is slang for firing an employee.
I had a boss once who conjectured that when you point a finger, there are three pointed back at yourself. I often come in to "rescue" projects after an initial developer or team, and more often than not I find just as many mistakes on the management side. For example - if the developer(s) have set up the production environment using their own personal AWS account, or set up DNS in their own name, yes, they screwed up…
If, as I've sometimes seen, the dev asks for credentials, and a founder doesn't do it, or continually ignores the requests, but pushes for 'get it live', falling back to personal credentials (with reimbursement or using a company card) is a not-unusual fallback.
If, after it's done, requests for transfer to a 'company account' are not made, again, dev at fault. If requests are made, but not granted, owner's fault.
I've seen multiple scenarios happen, and they've gone in all directions.
1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired. 2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data 3. Insulting the guy from the marketing/sales/customer service department for lack of technical knowledge. 4. Asking the woman from the customer service department to be a cheerleader to up his motivation while he…
If true, that is a pretty easy prosecutable criminal offense. Did you press charges?
Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common? My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For non-UK readers: according to Wikipedia, P45 is slang for firing an employee.
A P45 is the official document you receive when you leave employment (fired or not), it isn’t slang for anything though you may be threatened with a P45
Every time the development team could not grasp what was required. You literally had to exchange 20 emails with them for each specific point. Of course, this just increased the length of time for scope and in all cases furthered the time of the project.
Each stage of the application was over engineered to infinity. Spaghetti code everywhere and nonsensical functions, callbacks, literally everything was what the hell was the developer thinking.
Of course it just about worked. They had to ship something, but it was slow. The UI was painted into a corner, in some cases doing the wrong thing literally crashed the browser because of an infinity loop or took too much memory.
Some apps had about a billion dependencies and therefore could never be secure. I'm not kidding either, it's like the developer was a plumber instead of actually knowing how to code the simplest of things.
There was no way to ever extend it to build atop newer features or have any sort of roadmap for user requests.
In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. How to solve the problem? Start from scratch with a competent local company with an actual design and development process.
Want to know the best bit? One company I know of, who spent $6 million dollars on a project with an Indian company. An in-house developer took 3 months as a side project and rebuilt it from scratch. It ended up being the code from there on in.
I have NIH syndrome due to seeing these issues pop-up time and time again. In my career I've seen well over $15-20m being wasted in projects due to management being completely incompetent and thinking sitting on the phone with a dev team will ensure success.
Now I let them invite me to meetings when they think I'll add value, usually by talking through the product roadmap and business metrics.
I hate how whenever I ask them to attend more than two or three meetings a week they start showing up with competing offers. Now I let them invite me to meetings when they think I'll add value, usually by talking through the product roadmap and business metrics.