Live data from Hacker News

How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

anaxi.com

1–10 of 191 posts

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#2
I think #1 and #6 go hand in hand, and usually results in #2. If you disregard your team, and you're arrogant, your code will likely be sloppy as hell. In my opinion that makes you the worst member of the team.

I spoke with a coworker about this and we agreed that you just need to be humble as a software developer: we all are going to screw up, we don't all know all the answers, and we don't know why others in our teams say / know specific things, but we should not take their advise lightly it might of been a painful lesson for them to begin with!

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#3
Individuals often have little control over these things, and they are indicative of deeper cultural incentives. Without transgressing some, nothing will get done in many orgs. I see it a lot in big money VC backed startups, much less so in bootstrapped businesses. It’s important to be non-judgmental of people doing these things and simply leave or master Machiavellian moves to clear a path to promotion as other players are, eg. via optics or rallying support to oust “toxic” rivals for the good of the team.

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#4
9. Refuse to do any maintenance and only work on new projects.

10. Hide your actual productivity. IE: get done with your coding tasks in half the time, leaving other devs have to fix all the bugs that QA kick back. (This is probably a managerial issue, actually, but perpetuated by devs who do # 9.)

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#6

I think #1 and #6 go hand in hand, and usually results in #2. If you disregard your team, and you're arrogant, your code will likely be sloppy as hell. In my opinion that makes you the worst member of the team. I spoke with a coworker about this and we agreed that you just need to be humble as a software developer: we all are going to screw up, we don't all know all the answers, and we don't know why others in our te…

My girlfriend being a developer also we end up having this kind of conversation very often and we agreed to say the developers we enjoy the most to work with are knowledgeable but yet humble persons. In my opinions personality traits are often disregarded over technical skills during interviews.

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#8
In my experience people provide excuses because they're being addressed by management in a way that is unnecessarily negative and/or management is wanting to find "guilty people" and not work out which is the best person for the job of fixing things.

That the article is clearly refusing to even mention this casts a big shadow over the rest of its conclusions. Some of the other things are the result of personality (like taking credit or sloppiness) but making excuses is 100% context and a defensive coping strategy literally every time I have seen or done it.

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#9

There's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in myself at one time or another. I sometimes feel like I don't see anti-patterns as I go through my career, I fall over them and sprawl on the floor.

The important thing is that you can recognize your own problematic behavior, and actively work on fixing it. Nobody's perfect, but I imagine there's a reason the author put #1 as #1 ;)

Re: How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

#10
post #3

Individuals often have little control over these things, and they are indicative of deeper cultural incentives. Without transgressing some, nothing will get done in many orgs. I see it a lot in big money VC backed startups, much less so in bootstrapped businesses. It’s important to be non-judgmental of people doing these things and simply leave or master Machiavellian moves to clear a path to promotion as other playe…

Game theory suggests this is true. Dog eat dog. But do you think this is because incentives are misaligned, or do you think that even successful bootstrapped businesses, if around long enough, will fall victim to this culture?
Post reply on HN