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The worst programmer I know

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#191

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

segfaltnh wrote: post #154
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #124

I wish I could pair program more. I have so much knowledge to give other members of my team. Domain knowledge, programming knowledge, common pitfalls, etc. You get a code review pass at the time of writing the code, and it means you have more opportunity to change things for the better. Once it's written there's not much appetite for drastically changing working code during code review unless there's a really good re…

Frankly it sounds like you need to make this happen. I don't know your company culture but at places I've worked Staff+ engineers aren't meant to wait around for permission to be catalysts and mentor other engineers.

I'm usually the catalyst for change, but that's usually around tech and process. It's more effort for me to try and change my managers mind on what our development culture should be. The company I work for has a reputation for being a bit of a grinder and I've managed to help reduce that reputation in my team gradually at least.

But at the moment I have work to do and deadlines to meet, so it's a hard sell to suggest stepping back from active development and focusing more on incubating our less experienced devs. Even though it's better in the long term, and my manager would even agree on that, important short term projects just take priority.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#192

Post by orpheansodality »

vikramkr wrote: post #102

So basically he just had the wrong title? Sounds like a great engineering manager or lead (in a company where that involves less code writing) or something. But his title is an IC role. But if he's spending all day pairing and not writing code then yeah - that manager seems to be correct, that's not his job? Why isn't he taking on any stories?

pairing is taking stories, it’s two people working on one task together.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#193

Post by softfalcon »

owenmarshall wrote: post #74
_gabe_ wrote: post #62

Now when you Google “Tim Mackinnon programmer”, the 5th or 6th result for me is a link titled “The Worst Programmer” and the little descriptive blurb below that says “His name is Tim Mackinnon…”. I know the author was click baiting and flipping the story on its head, but I would be a bit annoyed if Googling my name + programmer surfaced something like that.

Annoyed? I’d love it: it would be an incredible door opener anywhere you went.

Yeah, this is a great opener to break the ice with during an interview.

You can even add some prestidigitation by having them take 30 seconds to Google it and your name comes up. Play it off as a joke and now everyone has a little smirk/chuckle over it.

Now they know you have a good personality and can tell a funny joke about yourself. Goes a long way to putting you in that “I can work with this person” category.

Also, if they can’t appreciate the joke, that’s an easy red flag for you that you probably don’t ever want to work for that team.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#194

Post by CuriousCosmic »

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

You say that but even in this thread you have tons of people claiming he was actually a bad programmer precisely because he wasn't also shipping code.

Yes it's a bad metric but so many engineers (not just managers) fail to understand that.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#195

Post by jonathanlydall »

nine_zeros wrote: post #105
andai wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. And I learned that doing it my way will get me fired because the manager has asked to do faster. The way I have learned to get around this is by making the manager publicly document the request to go faster. If they don't document, I don't see or act on it. Once…

This sounds like possible malicious compliance.

Regardless, it’s an important life skill to learn that it’s generally not enough to ask people to do what you want, you need them to actually “buy in” to what you want, and then they’ll actually care enough to at least try make it happen.

This applies to managers and their employees, or also when trying to get on the ground employees to adopt a product initially sold to their manager/execs.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#196

Post by voxl »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #143
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. Good. I hope it made you read the article and learn from it.

[flagged]

Re: The worst programmer I know

#198

Post by goalieca »

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?

5000 lines is silly, but all managers love that coder who closes tickets faster than anyone.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#199

Post by hnfong »

adolph wrote: post #166
tempodox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you choose the right frameworks which have sufficient momentum to last you say 10 years, you don't have to put yourself in the dilemma.

And yes, 10 years is quite possible these days. Besides the infamous Javascript framework churn, things are moving quite a bit slower in recent years.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#200

Post by beebmam »

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…

If your leadership is tossing these incredibly valuable engineers aside, then it's time for you to toss that leadership out. You can do that by leaving, or talking to management about this, or unionizing. It's crazy to me tech workers aren't unionizing anyway.
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