"This was cascaded through the organisation, and landed in our team in terms of story points delivered."
Bingo.
If I ever hear anyone in my company attempt to deliver a sentence like that then I will go postal.
The worst programmer I know
401–410 of 668 posts
Re: The worst programmer I know
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem in my last role when I read large Pull Requests is that they tended to be way more complicated than they should have been but because they worked and I couldn't single out a small number of specific problems, I had no choice but to approve. Still, I knew it would slow us down in the medium and long term but this bloat is completely invisible to management. It has become taboo to say things like "This code…
I sometimes use my job title as a higher level senior or lead to say vulnerable things like: "This change is hard for me to read and understand" or "This is a large PR, and it may be difficult for me to schedule time to review it. Can it be split up into a series?" I also configure linters and code quality tools to automatically flag some of the more egregious problems.
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Re: The worst programmer I know
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sometimes use my job title as a higher level senior or lead to say vulnerable things like: "This change is hard for me to read and understand" or "This is a large PR, and it may be difficult for me to schedule time to review it. Can it be split up into a series?" I also configure linters and code quality tools to automatically flag some of the more egregious problems.
I can relate though I wish I could get into a position that I could say such things and not get fired. In some circles "This change is hard to me to read and understand" would be interpreted as "I'm an aging dinosaur who doesn't understand this new tech; you youngsters are too clever for me." (though I realize how completely wrong it is). I'm 33 but I feel like I already have to make an effort to avoid the dinosaur l…
My secret weapon (rarely needed) is “I got this eventually, but someone may have trouble quickly figuring it out during a 3 AM outage.”
Re: The worst programmer I know
#404As half of the pair programming team, why not just give him half of the story points?
Maybe the tool doesn't support that.
Or maybe Tim didn't care about story points, he knew his worth, and he felt that if the company wanted to fire him on such an arbitrary metric, it wasn't a company worth working for anyways. In the end, he did well because he kept his job and the company dropped an inappropriate metric.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#405[deleted]
Re: The worst programmer I know
#406> 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 was the money quote. Teams do big stuff. Good teams do good big stuff (very good). Bad teams do bad big stuff (very, very bad). It seems that the hyper-competitive nature of today's workplace means th…
In my experience, the best raises are from getting a new job. What were raises like for your engineers that stuck around for 10-20 years?
FAANG type compensation doesn't come from "raises", it comes from good yearly performance bonuses.
(Although in my experience the raises you get from changing between smaller companies are still worse than just staying at one FAANG.)
Re: The worst programmer I know
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume they are insinuating that you are coming off as arrogant and only interested in teaching. They should definitely just say so, though. In a good pairing environment everyone is learning from everyone. You didn't explicitly say you were looking to learn for others though you also didn't explicitly say you weren't. As far as I'm concerned, in the best pairing environments everyone is always pairing with everyon…
>In a good pairing environment everyone is learning from everyone. You didn't explicitly say you were looking to learn for others though you also didn't explicitly say you weren't. Well that's the thing. The only reason I'm in a senior position at this company is because I never stopped asking questions and I still don't stop asking questions and learning from people more knowledgeable than me. I used to spend hours…
Yep, I feel this is a general broken thing about our industry. I'm very against the whole, "let juniors do easier stuff," mentality. I'm also very against the "you must make big disruptive changes in order to get ahead," as well. The latter often results in people just looking in the wrong places to try and improve things, often by introducing complexity instead of removing it.
I'm pretty jaded by it all. These days I work for a company whose primary business isn't technology and I'm much happier.
Re: The worst programmer I know
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually quite enjoying how divisive a simple quote can be. I wonder how often I've made a comment and gotten no engagement. This quote seems to have gotten more engagement than the original comment. And quite emotive engagement. Makes me wonder what that means. Is it genuine curiosity? Or is the quote saying something that the original commenter couldn't see themselves? It's interesting they suggested if I was i…
> I'm actually quite enjoying how divisive a simple quote can be The word for that is "trolling". > Importantly, they did not ask me. They told me. That too tells us something about what pairing experience with them would be. I asked and you avoided answering. What does that tell us?
> The word for that is "trolling".
Oh that is fascinating, so highlighting a verbatim quote, in context can be trolling?
What that makes me think of is that people are in denial about what the quote tells us and have displaced those feelings on to me! Amazing stuff.
> I asked and you avoided answering. What does that tell us?
This is interesting because no you didn't ask me what it tells us. You asked if I wanted to say something and I answered that the quote stands alone.
Really interesting stuff in this thread!
Re: The worst programmer I know
#409The worst programmer I knew never had any productivity problem; if anything he produced too much code, outpacing the others' ability to maintain certain levels of quality. He ended up promoted; in many organizations, people that hack the code rather than properly design and build sustainable solutions are highly valued.
Was he promoted to a job where he did more of that, or a job where they could make him stop writing code and do something else?
Re: The worst programmer I know
#410I was a colleague of these guys at Thoughtworks and my favorite most relatable tidbit was telling client managers “no”.
High performance teams at Thoughtworks really had almost full autonomy over how they worked. At a particular credit card bank in Delaware circa 2006, Jay Fields and I demanded (and got) flat screen monitors, our own conference room to use as a dedicated bullpen and most importantly, unfettered access to the open internet via custom holes in their firewall. Crazy times.