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The worst programmer I know

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#331

Post by CapitalistCartr »

Pamar wrote: post #221
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.

(I am from Europe, so I have a fairly good idea of what Unions can do, also thanks to having lived and worked in two different countries). I am not against Unionizing "per se" but the role of Unions has never been "tell the management how to run their business". There has been some cases of (smallish) company being "acquired" by their own workforce, and the Unions might have helped with formalizing the deal, but this…

A union would provide the sort of employment protections much of Europe alreadys enjoys.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#332

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The worst programmer I know

#333

Post by no_wizard »

Pamar wrote: post #221
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.

(I am from Europe, so I have a fairly good idea of what Unions can do, also thanks to having lived and worked in two different countries). I am not against Unionizing "per se" but the role of Unions has never been "tell the management how to run their business". There has been some cases of (smallish) company being "acquired" by their own workforce, and the Unions might have helped with formalizing the deal, but this…

Unfortunately union / labor movements in the US suffer from a big problem: due to historical circumstances they’re very combative. The labor movement here never grafted the idea of being business oriented on behalf of workers into the movement (like in Germany) rather, they treat the business as the enemy pretty much from the outset.

Some of that is indeed earned by the businesses reputation, but ultimately this is what I think spurred the decline of union membership in the US because businesses don’t get a lot if any value out of having a union around and the organized workers often find the benefits stagnant after some time

Re: The worst programmer I know

#334

Post by liquidpele »

Waterluvian wrote: post #53

I’ve met a lot of project managers who are competent and see the bigger picture. They actually pay attention and understand why the numbers are what they are. They respect that the numbers are a very flawed tool and cannot be utilized without context or understanding. I’ve also met a lot of project managers who are there because they’re incompetent. They lean heavily on “agile” and “best practices” and say moronic st…

Ive even seen good managers hold a few incompetents on purpose in preparation of layoff cycles in larger companies that do them consistently.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#335

Post by nobodyandproud »

Arainach wrote: post #190
TheRealPomax wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't get people promoted to that position just because that's what they're doing. Because politics.

My experience at Google has been that TLs were generally strong engineers who were doing that kind of mentorship and product leadership, so to the degree that it's a "promotion" (same money, more responsibility isn't a promo in my book) it does seem to go to those who are doing it. Now TLM (Tech Lead + Manager), however......there's a role that's set up for failure. Be a manager but be judged entirely on your technic…

I have to manage up, gently, reminding my manager and his peers that we’re managers first.

Any meaningful contribution or engineering is extra credit.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#336

Post by ryeguy_24 »

If you don’t own your company, you are always measured on optics. If the person who employs you does not optically see your value, you don’t stand a chance working there. If employment is the measurement, optics will always be important. For those who disagree, I would argue they are arguing on what would be ideal. Sure, it would be ideal to have a fully meritocratic performance system but if someone else is in charge of your employment or performance evaluation, your success is 100% based on their opinion of you. How do they get that opinion? It’s the optics whether valuable for the company or not.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about programming skill or value. I’m talking about employment and evaluations which I think most people are commenting on.

And also, it’s not mutually exclusive. I know many people who are very productive and also manage their optics well.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#337

Post by kvirani »

Stratoscope wrote: post #304

Some 20 years ago, I worked at a moderately large software company that sold a desktop application for Mac and Windows. The team had mostly Mac experience and they were just getting their feet wet with Windows. So naturally the Windows version had some problems. At the time, I was known as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help improve that version and help the team get more familiar with Windows programming. I…

I hope that feedback didn't discourage you from continuing with your approach to software development and teamwork.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#338

Post by JKCalhoun »

throwaway92837 wrote: post #80
JKCalhoun wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would be interested to know your career history in more depth. To my understanding even IBM in the 70s had stupid ways of measuring productivity (KLOCs?).

I wrote games until 1995, then started at Apple. I worked at Apple until 2021 when I retired.

Apple very much was engineer-driven when I began. That changed when Steve Jobs returned.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#339

Post by redbell »

Evaluating someone’s performance, especially, software engineers by non-tech people might produce dramatic results.

Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine, codenamed tommy. Tommy was an IT guy with incredible skills in networking. He moved to an energy company, fully-owned and operated by the government. Just a few weeks from his arrival, they had to rebuild the entire network from scratch with new, modern, equipments as well as extending the network to all the buildings of the company’s headquarters. They started to look for external contractors to outsource this project but Tommy was shocked by the price the financial department was willing to pay to get this work done, obviously, some non-tech people made the estimates. Tommy interrupted the operation and told the appropriate department he can do the work and needs only the physical equipments (routers, switches, cables) and two guys who can do the cabling. They agreed, and he took the challenge and delivered the work as expected within just a few weeks within less than a tenth of the initial budget. All that he got was a ”Thank you, you did good work” oral endorsement by his boss.

What a time to be an IT techie when your boss(es) are just old-school, who will never understand your true value.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#340

Post by sodapopcan »

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…

Pairing gets a lot of hate and is very misunderstood. It can be terrible, though, if the org doesn't encourage and teach it. There are also lots of things about pairing that are misunderstood, especially that things take more time.

I was on a team that paired all the time and it's sort of ruined me for anything else. We switched pairs daily and everyone would pair with everyone else (on the team). When a junior joined the team they would very quickly lose their junior status.

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