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The worst programmer I know

dannorth.net

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#351

Post by tastysandwich »

When I joined my company, I was introduced to this dev who'd been there since the start.

His English wasn't great. His Javascript wasn't "modern" - he kept using callbacks etc. He often poo-poohed ideas the younger wizz-bang devs had. And so I was warned - basically he's an old curmudgeon, set in his ways, he can't take any criticism but he'll dole it out, a pain to deal with.

I quickly learnt how untrue that all was. OK, his code isn't great. BUT he's 100% committed to delivering customer value. He understands the ins-and-outs like no one else. He thinks through every scenario from the customer's perspective, and absolutely NAILS it every time. The young devs didn't like him because he didn't give a shit about "GraphQL versus REST" or "Hapi.js vs Express vs Koa vs whatever".

Where the other teams would avoid involving him in design conversations, I'd pull him in straight away. And our team reaped the rewards of integration projects that delivered right out of the starting gate, rather than customers kicking them right back with complaints.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#352

Post by slowhadoken »

The business mindset wants employees to be contestants in a reality tv show. The process of creating things doesn't look like a commercial though. Progress doesn't care how you feel, it's a functional process that produces a clear perspective. Greed always obscures that vision.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#353

Post by sshine »

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…

> sucks being that person today because everything is about optics

Not everywhere. I’ve casually suggested five big changes to the startup I’m currently working for that others ran with. I’m proud that my ideas even make sense, and my reward is that others come to me for leadership. I would get more glory if I had also carried them out. But I’d rather do the things that others can’t, than what shines the most.

> 2000 lines of code per week terrifies me... That's over 100K lines of code a year

That would be incredible (and scary). But productive people I’ve seen the contributor metrics for who write vastly more than they read, still have a number of deleted lines growing with their added lines in some proportion.

There is a style of less re-use, more copy-pasting that just grows faster but also needs constant refactoring in trivial ways.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#354

Post by avar »

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

It's entirely possible that the subject of the article is a terrible programmer, if he were to sit down and write or maintain something as an individual contributor.

I've worked with people like that, who were pretty bad individually, but brilliant when part of the right team.

Writing code and directly enabling the productivity of others who are writing code are different skillsets.

Obviously there's some overlap, but you're most productive in Tim's role in you're complimenting the skillset of the person writing the code.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#355

Post by m3kw9 »

tastysandwich wrote: post #351

When I joined my company, I was introduced to this dev who'd been there since the start. His English wasn't great. His Javascript wasn't "modern" - he kept using callbacks etc. He often poo-poohed ideas the younger wizz-bang devs had. And so I was warned - basically he's an old curmudgeon, set in his ways, he can't take any criticism but he'll dole it out, a pain to deal with. I quickly learnt how untrue that all was…

Had this same issue, new young devs adding the latest programming tricks and saying yes to every fking thing as if a no will get hurt their “I can do anything” mentality. Others were not pushing back as it may make them look stupid or something, they treat the project like a social event.

A lot of these little things came back to bite hard

Re: The worst programmer I know

#356

Post by davidmurdoch »

voxl wrote: post #196
thatwasunusual wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty clickbaity title. Good. I hope it made you read the article and learn from it.

[flagged]

Ignore the others. It's a quick read and a good story, and I think most engineers or engineering managers could take away something from it, even if just reinforcing that your already know.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#357

Post by elliotec »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #341
kvirani wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am the same way with my coworkers. I spend a lot of time helping juniors with their code and doing code review. My boss talked to me and told me to stop helping out so much and focus on my own tickets.

It’s a balance. Sometimes it is worth spending a ton of time leveling up your team (teaching them to fish), and sometimes it’s much more helpful to have you do the work yourself (we ran out of food and you’re our best fisherman).

Re: The worst programmer I know

#358

Post by Sivart13 »

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.

A union doesn’t have the power to change management, and is just as likely to advocate to retain low performing ICs in the name of “solidarity”

Re: The worst programmer I know

#359

Post by gardenhedge »

_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.

My thoughts too. Sucks for him.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#360

Post by igama »

"Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team." - This happened years ago to me, with a manager pulling me aside and asking why my Tickets resolved were so low... They only cared about the number of tickets worked on...
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