Interesting that he did all this, and did F# in his free time. The F# community has been almost 100% positive and welcoming in my experience, which is impressive given how many people come to it with no functional experience and so make a lot of novice mistakes.
I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
91–100 of 164 posts
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#92This is incredibly honest. Maybe it's just me, but it 100% resonates with me. I find myself doing the exact same thing: as soon as I feel myself mounting up on my high-horse I have to talk myself down from being an asshat. I've gotten better at it because I'm now responsible for people's careers, and my pettiness is no reason to make someone's life suck because they are still learning -OR- because they think differen…
I agree with you that one part of the solution is to stop hiring people who only know that culture. The ability of individual agents to sow dysfunction far outstrips any individual contributions, in my experience.
However, I'm not sure that diversity is really a solution so much as a symptom of a solution, which is a healthy professional culture. Adding women and POC may work tactically but it's not a great long term strategy for solving that particularly problem -- it's entirely possible for women and POC to behave in this manner (although it's quite a bit rarer in my experience). Not saying you're suggesting this, but I've seen quite a few orgs where women and POC are hired as tokens and don't get to real positions of power where they have the power and responsibility to truly run things and reform/refactor systems. Reforming your organization so that it's not toxic to women and POC is an indicator that you're not going in the wrong direction, but it's hardly the end goal. In fact, it should be positively mundane, boring, average and the norm (and hopefully, will become that way soon).
Will these problems cease at that point? I doubt it. Callous, abusive leaders exist everywhere, and short of a massive societal shift where nonviolent communication becomes required reading for managers and leaders (which is verbatim what Satya Nadella did at Microsoft to great effect), the high leverage move would be to start there and not paper over the root.
These problems come from the top -- corporate and engineering leadership. If you have a culture that accepts and allows for brilliant jerks, there are a couple root causes:
1) Your leadership aids and abets it
2) Your leadership is apathetic about it
3) Your leadership dislikes it but feels powerless to stop it
If you've got issue class 1 or 2, it's likely more pragmatic to leave than try to wage a cultural coup (of course, more power to you if you can pull that off). If you've got issue class 3, well, maybe you've got some options. You can convince leadership that they've got a certain kind of problem -- easy enough. Then you've got to convince leadership that a given approach could ameliorate it -- doable, but tricky and not at all a guaranteed success. Finally, you've got the hardest part: actually implementing it. The resulting shift in power could result in folks trying to sabotage things, and success will be doomed unless it is unilaterally supported and individually guided through by leadership. This is rare, but possible (again the Nadella reference). But again, the goal should be to create a cohesive, respectful, supportive teamwork oriented environment, and the means should support that.
If you can pull that off, achieving not just diversity but a safe, sustainable place for folks of diverse backgrounds to thrive becomes a real possibility. I think that's why it's worth setting our sights there in the first place.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think diversity of skin color and gender will solve this problem in its entirety too. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be excellent developers who are focused outwards, on developing their teammates and building things well. Diversity is part of the picture, yes, but it's no instant win,…
Why did you feel the need to state the obvious? This is the kind of toxic nonsense that comes up every time someone mentions diversity. Its the status-quo "notallmen" argument again and again and again. Please, assume just for a minute that we aren't all idiots. Of -course- everyone has the capacity to be an idiot, but your unnecessary and highly defensive response is very telling.
Where did you get that the GP was highly defensive? I didn't read that at all. TBH I also thought it was strange that the proposed solution to certain toxic personalities was to hire different genders and races, which seems like a non sequitur to me.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#94The problem with the author is that he expects all code to be written the same way that he would have written it.
Nobody can read his mind but yet he's expecting rookies to write like veterans.
Typically experienced developers mentor junior developers. If that's not what the author wants to do, then hire only senior developers to not worry about junior mistakes.
Also instead of pointing out all the wrong things, pointing out the good things too are a way to boost the junior developer's motivation.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#95This guy ties his ego to his code, and assumes everyone does the same. The proposed solution is to not devalue the person by devaluing the code. This seems exactly backwards to me. Disconnecting ego from the work was the first big lesson I had when I started working in software. I hear parallel ideas from friends across industries, in fact an electrical contractor explained to me how he expects it of his apprentices…
Couldn't agree more -- one of my first real important lessons in the industry on the soft skills side of things. What went along with that was that it really took a while to sink in and figure out not just how to personally avoid it, but in a team setting how to help build a culture of that.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#96Somewhat related, can anyone recommend a place to get code reviews. I work for myself, and I haven't had many opportunities for code review in my career. I'm willing to pay market rate for a senior engineer's time. I personally need feedback for C, Swift, Python, and Javascript.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#97"If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart I feel ... And if you tell me that you haven’t had this feeling ever, then you’re lying." I can tell you I haven't had this feeling ever, but not for reasons I'm proud of. I hate doing code reviews. I have hated doing every one. I have disliked having to type every comment I have made on a code review. Each time I hope that ev…
I do tons of code review and enjoy it. I approach it with both learner/teacher attitude (not critic) and treat it as project learning and communication exercise.
Best way of doing code review is by asking questions.
Recently coworker recommended this talk which suggest good attitude IMO - you can find it under "strong code review" from rails conf
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#98When did code reviews become so ubiquitous? Articles complaining about the reality of code reviews seem to be commonplace. But if they're not working out, why not just abandon them, maybe try something different?
The issue is that code reviews are hard on people and good on code bases.
Dollar for dollar, code reviews are more effective at finding and fixing bugs than any other activity we can do, including QA tests. However code reviews are very hard on people, and can easily create conflict.
Which one matters more, and how careful people are, varies widely by organization.
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#99Here's one guiding principle I've thought a lot (and learned a lot about) during the past few years: learn to draw the line between how you allocate communications on the pull request and communications over chat -- don't be afraid to have a bias towards the latter. PR comments should be fairly light on a per line basis, and you may want to bring up architectural concerns if there are any, so that they're recorded there for posterity's sake.
But you want to look at it like an artifact that you'll later on refer to. Don't be a pedant and ding based on style. If there are substantial design flaws, politely note your concerns, and then hash it out over chat or in person. Your goal is constructive collaboration, and it's really important to use the right collaboration tool for the right job.
Often times, what happens in code reviews is that we find up front design that we neglected to do, or which was done in a way that has structural problems. That's fine -- in fact, the ability to do that incrementally is part of why lean works well. But that means that you've got to then do a proper design session (formal or informal) to get to a better ending place. If you really want to be cooking with gas, figure out a lightweight way to structure and record the results of these design sessions so that people will use and refer to them.
I've seen teams grind to a screeching halt over poor usage of these processes, and not because any of the engineers were poor individual contributors!
Re: I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think diversity of skin color and gender will solve this problem in its entirety too. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be this kind of self-centered egotist. People of every race and every gender have the capacity to be excellent developers who are focused outwards, on developing their teammates and building things well. Diversity is part of the picture, yes, but it's no instant win,…
Why did you feel the need to state the obvious? This is the kind of toxic nonsense that comes up every time someone mentions diversity. Its the status-quo "notallmen" argument again and again and again. Please, assume just for a minute that we aren't all idiots. Of -course- everyone has the capacity to be an idiot, but your unnecessary and highly defensive response is very telling.
You are really on the offensive here. The concerns you've raised here remind me of a time when I let news and social media pull me into that disgusting culture war on oppression, equality, collectivism, and individuality.
I still have my stance but I've found that people that get sucked in, on both sides, will get hypersensitive about detecting their opposition, and then they project all of the ideas they dislike the most onto the person in real life who exhibits a hint of it.
You might find that you are trying to find things to be angry about. You might feel very strongly that masculinity is toxic but you don't really have any examples in your life except for the two and a half times you got cat called. The "gamers" that hate minorities and women might be on the forefront of your mind, but only because you spend too much time consuming narratives online.
Genuinely how many people would be concerned about toxic masculinity if the internet didn't exist. How many people would be concerned about the culture war at all if outrage couldn't be shared.
As much as you might like to blame it on a particular skin color or gender, your happiness and peace of mind is your responsibility. If you are frustrated, angry, or sad about gamers, the gamers aren't the problem, you are losing control of your mind.