461–470 of 668 posts
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must’ve been Tommy’s first rodeo lol
And how would an experienced cowboy handle this situation?
Or ask for more work and don’t be surprised when you do or don’t get rewarded for it.
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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…
"You don't need to add an external dependency for that" "You're violating separation of concerns" I've found that kind of feedback to be useful actually. And when giving similar feedback it is received better with a small change in wording to make it more about the code and not the person. Even if that is the intention the wording does matter. For example: "An external dependency isn't needed here, try implementing w…
I’ve become fond of mostly asking questions.
I wonder if we could avoid this dependency? Maybe [idea] would work?
Can you see a way to separate the X concern into a module?
Can we split this function up a bit so the nesting won’t be so deep? Would this loop body make a good standalone function?
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It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135). 'In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell…
Harry Nyquist isn't exactly an unknown engineer who doesn't have his own achievements, though - not sure why people are saying he would be fired in a modern company!
Engineering excellence is not a prerequisite to business success. Managers know this.
Why else many things any one of us could list from the computing business.
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…
Each repair job had the same priority but some were much simpler than others - one month I thought I’d take the base station jobs to learn and because no one else was repairing them. They took longer to fix but obviously were more crucial to operations.
At the end of the month PHB held a team meeting where pie charts of utilisation were shown and I had performed terribly against the rest of the (senior and experienced) team. That was the moment I learned that the senior staff were picking off quick and easy jobs for a reason, and that office politics was a thing.
PHB couldn’t understand my reasoning of selecting those jobs and the outcome was his dislike of my performance… glad I learned about poor bosses that early in my career.
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…
Yes it is. Putting out fires, quickly, is very important.
The problem comes later when the breathing sapce arrives to regularise the fix and replace the band-aid with good quality code.
At this point no fire is burning, the problems are not immediately visible, and it takes very good management, right up the stack, to fix that sort of problrm.
> Not exactly something to encourage
Yes. Exactly right. Because the band-aid with all its ugliness becomes the permanent fix because there is no revenue box to place the work in takes to fix it into
I've asked this question a number of times now: What is the unit of work for software development? If you work on a factory line, you can measure widgets per hour and quality. In construction, you can measure distance or area completed. But in programming, you are not making a repeatable product like the factory line. You can say that developers deliver story points; that is the product, not the work. I invite you to…
Dollars.
Duh!
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And how would an experienced cowboy handle this situation?
1. Do the thing they pay you to do, keep your head down and watch the company light money on fire. Bonus points if after the project is inevitably late, you step in to "help" and save the day. 2. Start a consultancy company and overcharge clients to do this work. 3. Realize that many companies will not reward you for your efforts as you expect and go back to 1
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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.
"fully-owned and operated by the government" - This is the most important reason. For better or worse, gov't jobs are basically not allowed to meaningfully reward exceptional performance. There's just no mechanism for it. Not to say things like this don't happen in private industry too - it certainly does. But at least you've got a chance. In most companies there is room to meaningfully bonus or promote or otherwise…