The worst programmer I know • Hacker News Board

Re: The worst programmer I know

#111

Post by lcuff » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Well, I like the story here, but it's kinda against a bit of a strawman. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing the overall point of the piece, a point I agree with, but that said a metrics focussed manager could have simply added an "adjunct" label to the stories and had this "worst programmer" add themselves to stories as the non-lead developer. Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the ass…

Maybe ... Productivity itself is difficult to define. Different people will value aspects of the work differently

At one Internet Advertising company I worked for, the founder had written most of the original code. Written in the late 1990s, it was Perl, JavaScript, HTML, and SQL jumbled together. Completely ignoring the notion of 'separation of concerns'. Huge amount of code duplication. Source code control? Phhht! Nary a test in sight. Ran programs as root to work around permission problems. Self modifying code ... you betcha. He worked right on the production servers. He could and would push out a feature the same day a customer asked for it. VERY quick to make the customers happy. The company was being bought out at the time I came on board. Pocketed his millions, headed down the road, yay for him.

My own take is that the company would never have 'made it', if a software team had been hired to 'do it properly'.

After his departure, as we rewrote our code base to 'professional' standards, much time was spent refactoring that produced few or no new features. How productive was that? A very complex question.

As a digression, I sometimes found his original code easier to maintain that the stuff done 'the right way' because there WAS no 'separation of concerns'. I didn't have to hunt in a different part of the source tree for where something was done. It was all 'right there'. YMMV.

In the end, 'productivity' is way more subjective that we'd like.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#112

Post by notpachet » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #43

peter_retief wrote: post #26

I often wondered why s/w development is always a rush at the expense of quality. Well I do know why just don't agree with the principle of seeing how much the company can get out of a developer in x hours.

Having been in the industry since the around 1990, I can tell you that in the first half of my career we had no code reviews, no scrum, no story points, no unit tests. How on earth, you might wonder, did we ship software that worked? I then saw all these things come down the pike one after another during the last half of my career. Clearly to me every one of these benefit management who found themselves apparently un…

Scrum and story points I agree with, but unit tests? You'll have to pry those out of my cold, dead hands!

Re: The worst programmer I know

#113

Post by johndhi » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

Nice story. It's unfortunately really hard for higher management to see something like this. I guess it's on the middle manager to convince upper management of this.

Unfortunately in my current experience my manager is not at all like Tim.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#114

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #49

dharmab wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written several 100ks LOC/year at points in my career- but exclusively when working on new projects. When maintaining projects I might go a week at a time without writing any code solo, or I might spend a week trying to _reduce_ LOC.

I think my net contribution of lines of code at my current company is still negative. It was for a long time, but I haven't checked in awhile so I'm not sure if it still is.

[deleted]

Re: The worst programmer I know

#115

Post by pydry » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #8

pydry wrote: post #2

I sometimes wonder if developers should do an end run around all this bullshit and come up with and start measuring management productivity metrics. I dont see a downside to doing this.

"Hey, boss who can fire me, I just thought you should know that we on the team have started keeping metrics. I want you to know that your 'times you made the only girl on the team uncomfortable with a sexist joke' metric is unusually high this month, and your 'unblocked the team by speeding up an external request' metric is 0 for this month, down from 3 times last month" Let me know if you find any downsides. Anyway,…

>Anyway, management will of course argue that developers under them are incapable of seeing everything management does.

What a coincidence! Thats one of the first thoughts that crept into my head when code metrics started being used on me.

This "voyage of discovery" you've alluded to is exactly what I meant by no downsides.

If managers feels threatened by being measured by their employees after their employees start measuring them, well, that's also an interesting reflection is it not?

Re: The worst programmer I know

#116

Post by mynameisvlad » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

88913527 wrote: post #106

mynameisvlad wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more about measuring outcomes. We have a goal, did we meet the goal. There are many paths to the goal, so measuring things like lines of code is incorrect. But so is measuring Bob's ability to ask Alice a good question. Management can't, at scale, consider such factors. We don't have the counterfactual where Bob didn't ask the questions, and Alice did great anyways. Performance reviews would become even more sub…

> Management can't, at scale, consider such factors.

Why not? Peer feedback is a prime component of most performance/rewards discussions at companies. Work outside of points is certainly not a new concept. A manager's job is to distill this information amongst others to their own management chain at the right time.

> We don't have the counterfactual where Bob didn't ask the questions, and Alice did great anyways.

Bob's time isn't unlimited. There are surely instances where he was helping out Joe, Suzie, Darren, and James and had no time for Alice.

Based on your other comment, you seem to think someone being an unblocker/idea generator/dev lead is a "low performer" who weighs the team down. That's just fundamentally wrong.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#117

Post by Aperocky » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

Smells fishy.

Senior engineers in my knowledge and experience are all delivering on something relatively high impact while contributing massively to the team by occasional/often "pairing".

I've seen rare examples who don't "pair" but just deliver by themselves.

I've never seen an example where they don't deliver on anything (planning, design, architectures included) but only "pair" as their job every day.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#118

Post by xena » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

I'm this kind of person most of the time and it really sucks come review time. I'm also a mentor type and that is also very hard to account for in most systems. It means I do an essential role that is seldom rewarded because there's no number associated with my meddling.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#119

Post by jongjong » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

padjo wrote: post #107

jongjong wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate though I wish I could get into a position that I could say such things and not get fired. In some circles "This change is hard to me to read and understand" would be interpreted as "I'm an aging dinosaur who doesn't understand this new tech; you youngsters are too clever for me." (though I realize how completely wrong it is). I'm 33 but I feel like I already have to make an effort to avoid the dinosaur l…

I’m 10 years older, my experience has been that getting to ask stupid questions is one of the joys of age/seniority/security. Very often everyone else in the room has the same stupid question but you get to look like a stone cold genius because you were willing to risk looking silly.

I guess maybe in 10 years I'll be working with 30 year olds who understand and value of that approach as I do today.

My current reality is that I'm a 33 year old working with 20 year olds who think they're geniuses who are going to take over the world in 5 years; from that viewpoint, I'm essentially a failed engineer because I didn't build a Facebook, Uber or AirBnB even though I had 10 years to do it.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#120

Post by Aperocky » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

> I tend to think that the dev who can churn out thousands of lines isn't thinking deeply enough about the long term direction of the project; all the code they're writing is essentially throwaway code.

This is a strong statement. There are both people who are writing throwaway code and people who are writing essential code that match the description.

And one will never get to be the latter part without going through a phase where they are doing the first.