Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The worst programmer I know

dannorth.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 668 posts

Re: The worst programmer I know

#91

Post by nine_zeros »

brundolf wrote: post #85

> You see, the reason that Tim’s productivity score was zero, was that he never signed up for any stories. Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. Pretty clickbaity title. This isn't a story about a bad programmer, it's a story about a bad metric, and an even worse manager who followed it blindly

> Pretty clickbaity title. This isn't a story about a bad programmer, it's a story about a bad metric, and an even worse manager who followed it blindly

The clickbait is made so that this document can be shared with a future shitty manager. If you send them a link titled "The Worst Manager" - I assure you their first reaction will be to figure out how to get rid of you.

Managers are the bane of this industry and sadly, engineers have to spend an immense amount of time dancing around shit managers.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#92

Post by andai »

tempodox wrote: post #71
jongjong wrote: post #18

It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…

The saddest thing is that some bosses want throwaway code. I had a short stint once in a company where the owner wanted the web service rewritten from scratch every 6 months so they could use the newest web framework and follow the current fashion. He would hire a 5000 LoC per week hero on the spot.

Tangential but I was doing a web app for a client and gave a time estimate, which accounted for doing things properly (i.e. learning a frontend framework first).

He asked "can you do it faster" and I agreed, thinking I'll make a throwaway version first and fix it later. Needless to say the project was a disaster, rapidly became unmaintainable.

That's how I learned my job isn't to do what the client asks, it's to make sure their project succeeds even if it means making them (temporarily) unhappy.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#93

Post by mynameisvlad »

88913527 wrote: post #19
jongjong wrote: post #18

It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…

Because it's a bogus argument. The productive person doesn't need a paper weight at lunch to act as a shower thought generator. Management can get it wrong sometimes, but in broad strokes, they're right.

Define "productive".

Because lins of code churned out is not and has never been a good measure of productivity.

That "shower thought generator" might very well be more productive than the person they're sitting next to churning out tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable code if their shower thoughts are causing people to find better ways to solve a problem.

Which is basically the entire point of the article.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#94

Post by jongjong »

pc86 wrote: post #73
jongjong wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem in my last role when I read large Pull Requests is that they tended to be way more complicated than they should have been but because they worked and I couldn't single out a small number of specific problems, I had no choice but to approve. Still, I knew it would slow us down in the medium and long term but this bloat is completely invisible to management. It has become taboo to say things like "This code…

I'm honestly not familiar with this "I had no choice but to approve" mindset. In the greenfield projects I've worked on there was always at least one person, sometimes several, who had the authority to just say "no, this is far too complex, scratch it all and we'll meet tomorrow to discuss next steps." Sometimes it ended up with breaking the PR into several more manageable pieces, sometimes it ended up with a wholesa…

I didn't have enough leverage in that company to say such things and the project had already been running for a couple of years when I joined (not greenfield).

The last greenfield project which I managed from scratch, we didn't have this problem because all developers shared the same mental model of what we were building before we wrote any code. We had a lot of discussions beforehand to get to this shared understanding. There was literally not a single PR which surprised me throughout the entire project and I'm sure none of my PRs were a surprise to any of my team mates either. There was plenty of disagreement throughout but it was always fully resolved through discussion before we started coding each major feature.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#95

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

jongjong wrote: post #18

It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…

Depends on the company and management. Google codifies this role to some extent as Tech Lead, which is an engineer expected to act as a force multiplier and mentor more than an individual contributor.

It doesn't always work as designed (ok, maybe rarely works as designed), and TLs can get too bogged down in cat herding, planning, and bike shedding to actually work as an engineer. But at least the spirit of the role is sound.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#96

Post by nickserv »

corethree wrote: post #50
bee_rider wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that’s the conventional approach in Python, though? It is a duck-typing language, try-except is a legitimate way of seen if an operator works on an object, and objects should do sensible things with operators. The funny example is that the hasattr built-in just tries to getattr, and then catches the exception to tell if it has the attribute.

Conventions are changing. Modern python is shifting to type checking with external type checkers.

The two are not incompatible. I'll type all class properties and functions, but still use try/except on dict access or function calls.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#98

Post by gumby »

One really good developer I worked with wrote excellent code and also terrible code that had to be replaced immediately — and both made him great to work with.

The value of writing good code is self explanatory. You probably use some of his code today.

But he was also great in a firefight: customer is dead in the water and it might be our fault. He’d show up cold and “jam his fingers in the holes in the dam”: quickly figure out what was wrong and then rapidly write and install the most hideous spaghetti code that cot the customer up and running. Code that could not be checked in, or be refactored. Eye-bleeding stuff. Someone would have to take the time to engineer a proper fix, but the immediate crisis was averted.

I was actually much more impressed by the latter skill — among other reasons it’s simply rare. Also he was just a nice guy and everybody loved him.

(Won’t name him since I described some of his code as hideous)

Re: The worst programmer I know

#99

Post by nerdponx »

pc86 wrote: post #73
jongjong wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem in my last role when I read large Pull Requests is that they tended to be way more complicated than they should have been but because they worked and I couldn't single out a small number of specific problems, I had no choice but to approve. Still, I knew it would slow us down in the medium and long term but this bloat is completely invisible to management. It has become taboo to say things like "This code…

I'm honestly not familiar with this "I had no choice but to approve" mindset. In the greenfield projects I've worked on there was always at least one person, sometimes several, who had the authority to just say "no, this is far too complex, scratch it all and we'll meet tomorrow to discuss next steps." Sometimes it ended up with breaking the PR into several more manageable pieces, sometimes it ended up with a wholesa…

In my experience it pops up when company politics get involved, or somebody gets attached to their idea about how certain things should or shouldn't be done. In that case often the safest thing you can do for your own reputation and appearance is to leave some very gentle notes that a certain thing maybe could have been done differently, but approve it anyway on the grounds that it works for now. That way you're not seen as an obstructionist, but if things do go wrong you at least have a written record so you can say "I told you so".

Re: The worst programmer I know

#100

Post by pydry »

commonlisp94 wrote: post #11
ruined wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's called a labor union

unions don't measure productivity. They group people based on credentials + experience, and treat everyone as interchangeable within those buckets.

You're thinking of management.

I'm sure most unions would love performance based pay where union reps decide what constitutes good performance. For some mysterious reason management is as keen on unions exercising their judgement as unions are on management deciding.

Where unions agree policies that treat members as interchangeable (e.g. age based pay) it is usually as a result of a compromise brooked with management who would love to have the latitude to give pay raises to scabs, kiss asses and spies.

Post reply on HN