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The worst programmer I know

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#291

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #281
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a very good chance that the same feature set could have been implemented with just 10K lines of code, less buggy and in half the time A significant part of my personal code review process, is going back through my code, and factoring out complexity. It takes time and humility, but is very much, in my opinion, worth it. Documenting my code is a trick that helps. When I am writing why I did something, I some…

A big, big tool for that, is OOP inheritance, which is considered "bad coder" signal, these days. Is it? I’d agree that there’s increasing awareness of the limitations of OOP, and I’d agree that using inheritance excessively can be one of the limiting factors, but I don’t think I’ve ever personally seen anyone criticised or penalised for using inheritance appropriately .

Just using OOP is considered bad. There is no "appropriate" way to use OOP. I see people being criticized for that, all the time.

I have run into folks that don't understand polymorphism. It seems that it is not even being taught.

Old Boomer Yells at Sky

Re: The worst programmer I know

#292

Post by [deleted] »

reneherse wrote: post #187
jongjong wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious what type of company has these team demographics. Startup, agency, SMB, bigcorp, academia, or?

[deleted]

Re: The worst programmer I know

#293

Post by lostlogin »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #249
beebmam wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

71% of Americans support unions - though you may not live there.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...

Re: The worst programmer I know

#294

Post by johnnyanmac »

jader201 wrote: post #188

The moral of this article seems to just point out what we all already know, and what has already been discussed on HN countless times: don't measure performance solely by things that should never be measured in a vacuum (like story points, lines of code, etc.). Not sure why this is the #1 article on HN right now, other than maybe the (what I would consider) click-baity headline. But I wish there was an acceptable way…

>E.g. would it be at the top if the title was "Don't measure performance by story points"?

TBH it's a non-zero chance here on HN. "Don't measure by story points" is still preaching to the choir to a community like this after all.

>I guess some interesting anecdotes have resulted in the post, but the message of the article itself doesn't seem to share anything particularly new or enlightening.

1. Lucky 10k. Especially if it involves some managers who may in fact be doing this stuff as we speak

2. Generally, I come to the comments because some anecdotes are more interesting than the article.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#295

Post by jacobsenscott »

beebmam wrote: post #200
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.

When you can get a bootcamp certificate, and then get two remote jobs and coast at both for 12 months, and then repeat, what could a union do for you?

Re: The worst programmer I know

#296

Post by rightbyte »

lcuff wrote: post #111
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!…

> 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.

This is my take too as I have gained experience. The way I did code from the get go, was the overall best way. Long function that did the stuff one thing at a time. Like no functions called from different parts of the call tree. I breeze to debug and understand or modify.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#297

Post by vegetablepotpie »

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…

The ironic thing is that may have generated exactly the outcomes management wanted.

I’ve worked at places where it was more important for management to know what to expect than to achieve raw productivity towards a goal.

The people who were estimating in good faith may have assumed that management was acting in good faith. Whereas a lot of projects are created aspirationally or have artificially short deadlines to “motivate” people. The stress they incurred may have just been for the emotional satisfaction of a manager and not have provided any more value than that.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#298

Post by SeanLuke »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #249
beebmam wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

I have seen first-hand the negatives of unions in Italy: there are downsides of powerful union control. But in the US, a strong argument can be made that unions played a very major part (along with the GI Bill of course) in the growth of the the middle class from 1950 to 1980, and their busting, starting with Reagan, likewise was instrumental in the dwindling of the middle class and the dramatic rise in wealth inequality.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#300

Post by refulgentis »

I don't buy it and they sound like a very annoying coworker. If he's 100% devoted to pair-programming and makes such a massive difference, promote him to a lead. Programming is the only profession that acts like it's literally impossible to ever measure productivity at all without committing some obvious wrong. Drives me nuts, coming from a blue collar background. It's cargo cult thinking used to justify many negative outcomes.
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