I find it amusing and very telling that the organizations with the most burdensome and unnecessary overhead are always the first to take an interest in developer productivity. A metric which their own structural inefficiencies are in direct opposition to.
The worst programmer I know
141–150 of 668 posts
Re: The worst programmer I know
#142> 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 sadl…
Bad managers who want to control instead of empower are the bane of this industry.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#143> 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.
Good. I hope it made you read the article and learn from it.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#144I worked at a company for a couple years where you had to produce 10 points a week or you got pipped. Didn't matter if you were a jr or sr. I worked on a few teams there and you could immediately tell how the teams measured points by the stress level of the developers. Teams that attempted to measure the points in good faith were stessed and most of them showed signs of burn out. They regularly worked 60 hours a week…
We called that Scrumflation at a past company. Didn't finish everything for the week? Claim the ticket was done and open a bug for the uncompleted work.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#145It’s like Draymond Green. Individually his statistics suck. He’s jokingly called Mr Triple Single (a triple double is a major achievement, a triple single not so much). But he’s such a fantastic defensive coordinator and playmaker that his impact metrics on the team are massive. Like practically comparable to Steph, his more lauded teammate, in some stretches. A common refrain in basketball is that people forget it’s…
That impact should show up in the plus/minus score?
https://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm
For 2022/23 Green ranks 38. His defensive impact is very high but it is offset by his negative offensive impact.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#146It’s like Draymond Green. Individually his statistics suck. He’s jokingly called Mr Triple Single (a triple double is a major achievement, a triple single not so much). But he’s such a fantastic defensive coordinator and playmaker that his impact metrics on the team are massive. Like practically comparable to Steph, his more lauded teammate, in some stretches. A common refrain in basketball is that people forget it’s…
And similarly to sports, there are devs who understand this, and devs who actively refuse to do things like pair, mob, or collaborate and just want to be handed work pellets so they can pick up their headphones and go to la-la land.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Very senior dev: ... that should take about an hour. Red flag!
Why do you say red flag? It is an exaggeration, of course, nothing is purely 1 hour. Rather it is 1 hour work in flow state, which is about 2 pomodoros, which is about 6 bulletpoints, which is about 1/4 of a day’s programming effort. Just about right for a 1 point card by a senior who only sit down to code when they kinda exactly know what to write
Talking about flow state and estimates? The red flag just gets bigger. You are asking me to show you that Santa is not real.
A "very senior dev" will not be handing out "1 hour" estimates to a product team. An hour of what? Billable hours? Wall-clock time? It's just not the right framing. You will notice a good senior dev will be incredibly cautious about any commitment and not hand out "ego estimates" like one hour. They will make commitments that they can keep and it will be terms of releases.
They will have experienced a decade of "one hour jobs" that have exploded so they know that even the error bars on a slam dunk 1 hour of butt-in-seat time means it's not a 1 hour estimate. An hour of butt-in-seat coding time is not a 1 hour of employee time - they've got that training course, those interviews, they need to support that thing, oh the presentation, the intern to look after. That feature you are copying? What is it copy-paste or some refactor generalisation? Measure that shit in weeks. Oh and there are 6 feature branches overlapping that area already. You also have a policy to improve the tech debt of this crusty code. There is also the documentation, training material, translations, the test suite, code review, the issue tracker... But hey, you can do it, you are x10, you boot up your machine and... your IDE is crashing because of some security update. Doesn't count in that one hour eh?!
That's not even the main issue, odds are the first over the shoulder demo of this new feature will be just the start of eliciting the real requirements.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#148This worst programmer sounds eerily similar to the best one (from the Twitter thread).
Re: The worst programmer I know
#149If I worked somewhere where a guy would shadow me, hover around and 'support' me that would make me quit very fast.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#150Smells 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.
You do realize that pairing is also delivering in everything you mentioned? Just because you hadn't the luck to experience this in your career so far doesn't invalidate this