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The worst programmer I know

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#431

Post by whirlwin »

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…

What an odd practice. Not sure who conducted the review, but managers especially should be familiar with the concept of coaching, and recognize that you were doing a great deal of it. I am a technical manager myself and spend a lot of time on coaching team members too.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#432

Post by acedTrex »

no_wizard wrote: post #430
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…

Much can be done with self advocacy I was hired at a company to help scale their development because their app was growing fast but they needed a leap forward in architecture and approach or they couldn’t keep up with growth. I documented everything I did from day 1, from what I was doing as well as why. When it came review time, everything ended up reflecting really well, for I may have closed less tickets than my p…

yep, you have to be loud about your work, especially if it is not trackable via other direct metrics like ticket count

Re: The worst programmer I know

#433

Post by robryan »

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…

Seems like it would just incentivise every ticket being estimated as something like an 8.

Even in an environment where story points essentially mean nothing it already ends up with some people just wanting to put high numbers on everything.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#434

Post by lolinder »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #248
gumby wrote: post #98

One really good developer I worked with wrote excellent code and also terrible code that had to be replaced immediately — and both made him great to work with. The value of writing good code is self explanatory. You probably use some of his code today. But he was also great in a firefight: customer is dead in the water and it might be our fault. He’d show up cold and “jam his fingers in the holes in the dam”: quickly…

>I was actually much more impressed by the latter skill — among other reasons it’s simply rare Not exactly something to encourage, but it sounds like he has experience in competitive competitions, where generating code to a problem on the fly is necessary. It's not something you can't learn yourself, but rote memorization of common problems and solutions (to the point where you can mechanically type down some algorit…

Don't competitions usually have completely different kinds of problems than what you typically run into in production fires? When I think of competitive programming I think of algorithms and puzzles, not network errors and data corruption.

In my experience production fires are rarely put out by rote algorithmic knowledge, the skill is more having a detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every layer of the system so that you can come to the right conclusion based on the very limited information available in the average production monitoring system.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#435

Post by no_wizard »

goalieca wrote: post #198
l33t7332273 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If they can keep them closed.

One sign I see if a healthy workplace is one that tracks bugs and QA issues downstream against the same unit of work.

You quickly get a sense for what teams and even individuals are introducing the most bugs and issues.

If you can close tickets fast and your bug rate is low: that’s key, but I have found often that the people introducing the most bugs and issues into the codebase that others have to spend time dealing with are those that seemingly close their tickets rapidly every sprint

Re: The worst programmer I know

#436

Post by cellularmitosis »

paulcole wrote: post #388
redbell wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! But after a while he knew why there was no kind of reward whether in the form of a financial compensation, a promotion or even additional days of vacation. Simply because the law of work does not have a section for exceptional performance/achievement.

must’ve been Tommy’s first rodeo lol

And how would an experienced cowboy handle this situation?

Re: The worst programmer I know

#437

Post by robryan »

jimmaswell wrote: post #370
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…

Pair programming sounds so stressful and unproductive to me. You can't read someone's mind. Any interjections while someone is in the middle of coding can't be more than distracting noise most of the time. And I would constantly feel self conscious that I'm taking too long to write something, googling or asking Copilot stupid questions, etc. Reviewing after the programmer believes it's ready to review makes much more…

I agree with you for a case where you are taking a feature from start to end. The case where you are spending half an hour unblocking someone who is stuck or brainstorming a better solution for something tends to be beneficial though.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#438

Post by no_wizard »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #262
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…

> 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…

Some of that is the fact industry never really evolved OOP approaches and they tended to trend to toward heavy and complex. Peers aren’t great with the power OOP can have.

I’ve also seen composition go sideways too.

Sometimes it feels like nobody takes software engineering seriously anymore, if I’m being honest

Re: The worst programmer I know

#439

Post by rubicon33 »

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.

The approach the company I work for has taken, is that leads and managers are primarily coders.

I think this makes sense especially for smaller companies, but it does put a extra emphasis on hiring well. Basically, I'm expected to code and helping my team is secondary to that. If I want the team to succeed I need to hire people who are self motivated and competent enough that they only require a little guidance here and there.

Turns out that's very difficult to hire consistently for. Finding self motivated and highly skilled developers just isn't all that easy in todays climate of boot campers.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#440

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

no_wizard wrote: post #438
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…

Some of that is the fact industry never really evolved OOP approaches and they tended to trend to toward heavy and complex. Peers aren’t great with the power OOP can have. I’ve also seen composition go sideways too. Sometimes it feels like nobody takes software engineering seriously anymore, if I’m being honest

Yeah, I remember that "Write a story. The nouns are objects, and the verbs are methods." school of thought.

I never warmed to that. In my experience, it resulted in unholy messes.

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