The worst programmer I know • Hacker News Board

Re: The worst programmer I know

#161

Post by DiabloD3 » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

l33t7332273 wrote: post #156

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…

>Managers always love a developer who can consistently write 5000+ lines per code per week What managers care about this at all?

The ones that work at companies that promote incompetence.

You know, most companies.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#162

Post by asveikau » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #150

Aperocky wrote: post #117

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.

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

More cynically, perhaps they have experienced this but labelled the person as a non-performer.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#163

Post by pizzafeelsright » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #117

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.

Hi. I barely deliver anything of value from my perspective.

I asked to swap teams. Two levels up both said "no way you can't be replaced. "

I have a reputation and didn't know.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#164

Post by esafak » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:13 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.

At my last company we had an architect whose only direct coding contributions were deletions, because nobody gets credited for cleaning up code.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#165

Post by acdha » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

fnimick wrote: post #134

wonderwonder wrote: post #104

I 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…

> 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. So in the short term, the company benefited, yeah? They got more work out of the same people than they would have if they didn't apply the pressure. Reminds me of an old boss I had who would flat-out say that to get a project done we would "hire someone and burn the…

The question is whether you get more volume but lower quality: a team doing 60 hour weeks on a regular basis tends to be a team baking in lots of technical debt and skipping “slow” things like “do we really understand what our users really need?” or “did we correctly architect this?” Everywhere I’ve seen this there’s been a lot more rework and things like high infrastructure bills because people have [correctly] learned that the business doesn’t care about quality.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#166

Post by adolph » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

> 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

This sounds like an improvement over the opposite, a code base that is rarely touched and uses eol frameworks. Software is a living thing and if you don’t act as a ruthless gardener you wind up a museum curator with 1990s DEC hardware running in the 2010’s.

The right balance of staying current and not reinventing the wheel is not trivial.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#167

Post by criddell » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

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.

That's not generally how it works in professional sports with player unions. Nor does it work that way in the film and television industries where there are unions representing writers, directors, actors, etc...

The shape of the union is whatever the membership wants it to have.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#168

Post by AugustoCAS » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #89

It is also possible if they fired this guy, and replaced him with another developer that only did points that the organization would be more productive. Without quantifying it or comparing to an alternative, this is just feel good commentary. If you deliver any value, that does not consequently make you a good business decision. You have to pit your value against your cost and the companies best alternative option. A…

The answer to your scenario is `yes` with a high probability (taken from my magician's hat), but only in the short term.

People like the one described in the article prepare a pipeline of good engineers, who also have experience in the domain and in the organization.

So if one cares about fast delivery, get a good number of sr engineers who work on their own thing, share little and are not encumbered by each other. If a company needs to deliver urgently this works, but is an (expensive, short term) option.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#169

Post by solarmist » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #72

yabbs wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories like this happened is because managers

ok. most managers suck. but ultimately you have to have at least one adult in the room.

And usually it isn’t the manager, even if they want to be. They’re managers because they’re good at projecting to their boss’s wants and needs.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#170

Post by mynameisvlad » Sat, Sep 02, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

38 wrote: post #123

mynameisvlad wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite simply, no. You're not going to learn from being handed an answer on a silver platter. You'll implement it, get on with your day, and not at all think about why the answer is what it is.

> You'll implement it, get on with your day, and not at all think about why the answer is what it is. this is an incorrect assumption. some people (like me) have an analytical mind. if I am given an answer, I will usually reverse it back to the question, so that I understand how it came about. or I will ask follow up questions until I have that understanding. all this method is doing is forcing multiple people to go…

Just because you're a special snowflake (you aren't, but keep believing it if it works for you) doesn't mean that the discovery process isn't the best approach for teaching most people things. Hearing or reading something is the lowest form of learning and generally results in the lowest retention.

> thats just a huge waste of time.

Instilling knowledge and discovery rather than rote completion of work based on others' ideas is far from a "waste of time" for people who actually understand the learning process. Growth is generally desired in the business world, even if it results in a short term hit.