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How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

anaxi.com

11–20 of 191 posts

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

#12

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.)

#9 for sure. Probably a side effect of being sloppy or writing bad code.

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

#13
As mentioned above, either the code works or it doesn’t … but it needs to work in combination with all the code being added to the codebase by your teammates.

That is Linus' job (or one of his trusted lieutenants). Kernel contributors generally do not interact with each other directly. There are simply too many kernel contributors to hold all kinds of "team meetings". The problems that the article mentions, exist mostly in a corporate environment. Virtual, distributed teams generally do not have these problems.

Software engineering is probably the most collaborative work in today’s world.

Yes, but successful software, such as the linux kernel, is not developed in the way he believes it is. What corporate IT typically does, is certainly not a reference.

A manager who doesn’t understand this is a manager who doesn’t understand software engineering.

A manager who does not read, evaluate, and merge pull requests, is not a manager; and does indeed not understand software engineering. The article complains about the side effects of one particular, rather outdated approach to software engineering. You will, for example, not hear the PostgreSQL or the Debian team complain about that kind of issues.

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

#14
Common misconception, but that graph does not explain the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's actually more like a linear curve, it's just a little flatter than the graph of y = x.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the best people underestimate their relative abilities, and the worst overestimate. So, the worst 10% may estimate they are about average, while the top 10% might estimate they are in the top 20%. These are more realistic figures than the graph used in this article.

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

#18
I thunk there's a second "flavor" of arrogance, where a person believes they're the smartest, but not most knowledgeable, in the room. These people will openly admit they can improve and seek training, partly because they believe they're capable of anything. They don't think they're at the top of the mountain, just that their mountain has no peak.

The real problem is they believe "lazy" coworkers will eventually be below them in every subject. They may seek out colleagues' advice some times, but likely will never return because they "get it" now."

They'll act like a "jack and master of all trades." This can be nice in small teams, but usually leads to components nobody (not even the arrogant one) can understand let alone maintain. So experts need to be brought in, anyway.

These people let the quick ascent of "Mount Ignorance" multiple subjects get to their head. No such thing as a Renaissance man anymore.

Sadly, I'm that flavor of arrogance.

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

#19

As a solo developer who does all these, I have a lot of self-loathing.

The worst are the "What the hell was I even doing here?!?!? / What does this even mean?" moments.

Like at one point I thought this code was obvious and worked great. I remember feeling that way about it and feeling all accomplished here, but now I don't feel that way and this code seems impenetrable or at least a big hassle now...

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