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The worst kind of programmer

mikhailian.mova.org

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Re: The worst kind of programmer

#11

Post by pkolaczk »

The examples given in the article do not match the final conclusion. This is all non sequitur argument. They chose a commonly known, boring tech stack (Spring boot and Angular) and then used them incorrectly and the project failed. And the authors conclude that choosing the tech stack was the problem.

I argue the real problem was in management - two guys working alone and the rest of the team not participating and not learning until late in the game. Adding people to the project at the end of its lifecycle rarely works well. No knowledge sharing and one guy leaves, what can go wrong?

Another problem is not having anything working for a very long time in the beginning. After a week of work the management should have asked for a demo and if nothing was working, they should start questioning the skills of those two „rockstars”.

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#12

Post by gHeadphone »

davedx wrote: post #2

It's a good discussion to have! I've been in both sides of these roles over the years. I think the problems in the article really seem to be lack of technical design or leadership though, rather than problems with individual programmers or personality types. You can't have one guy leave, another guy come in, have the same issues then blame the people. The process is broken! At any kind of head count beyond 5+ people,…

I love the cats analogy. It reminds me of the book even tougher than herding cats (about tech management) https://www.amusingmulcahy.com/my-first-book-even-tougher-th...

No mention of autistic cats there as far as i remember!

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#13

Post by taberiand »

wredue wrote: post #4

Yeah. Functional programming happened to be trending again and our lead service bus developers decided to write Java like it’s Haskell. Now their garbage keeps crashing with stack overflows, and they complain when files are bigger than a few hundred lines. We accidentally pushed a 10,000 line file once and it brought the entire bus to a crawl for an hour. TEN THOUSAND LINES. One day, these twerps pushing this stupidi…

Yeah that's not the fault of a functional approach, that's just bad code.

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#14

Post by upon_drumhead »

smallstepforman wrote: post #5

I feel confused. Even though I’ve been doing C++ embedded systems and drivers, C++ network protocols, C++ graphics engines (OpenGL and Vulkan), C++ video codecs etc, on many OS’s, all this for over 25 years professionally, I must admit I have no clue about the articles technology stack, programming techniques, languages, or architecture. Am I completely out of touch with this industry?

The industry is made up of hundreds of different microcosms of technology stacks.

Knowing a fundamental language like C++ as well as you do, you’ll be just fine.

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#15

Post by sk11001 »

The point of the article is buried under the bait that is the list of qualities to watch out for. The main problem was that these people overengineer things and work without any collaboration or business context.

Out of the four listed qualities:

    Ability to find satisfaction in solving abstract problems

    Ability to put up many hours of work

    Passion in software engineering

    Narcissism and self-confidence
Only the last one is actually a problem (and it's the narcissism really, not the confidence). The way the author has laid it out can make it look like "passionate hard-working people who like solving abstract problems" = bad. Which isn't true but it can seem like an appealing proposition if you're not that passionate/hard-working/etc.

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#16

Post by GoToRO »

smallstepforman wrote: post #5

I feel confused. Even though I’ve been doing C++ embedded systems and drivers, C++ network protocols, C++ graphics engines (OpenGL and Vulkan), C++ video codecs etc, on many OS’s, all this for over 25 years professionally, I must admit I have no clue about the articles technology stack, programming techniques, languages, or architecture. Am I completely out of touch with this industry?

The industry has expanded due to high demand, but the procentage of smart people in the population did not. So you have all kinds of people that should really not write any code, write code.

Also managers decided to give all decision making power to people that don't even understand code: scrum masters, project managers, product owners, team leads ans so on.

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#18

Post by gdsdfe »

Funny, you can't actually get any job without leetcode these days ... But if you overcome that the problem in my opinion is that people think their problems are unique and hey maybe it is the case, for like 10-20% of us, the rest are just dealing with the same issues with a slightly different flavor

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#19

Post by sebastianconcpt »

All this for me has nothing to do with programming or programmers and much less to skill level. All that is superficial. What's lacking there is deep alignment before jumping into coding and too much concentrated dependencies in specific individuals instead of team. Call it process problem if you want. It's a people and culture of that team problem that downstream to a process that didn't care enough about teammates know-how transfer and mission sharing as part of the job. The outcome is a company with a project with an unsolved bus factor [1] and all the details about which tech stack enabled what are as irrelevant as their inevitable outcomes to that culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Re: The worst kind of programmer

#20

Post by groestl »

smallstepforman wrote: post #5

I feel confused. Even though I’ve been doing C++ embedded systems and drivers, C++ network protocols, C++ graphics engines (OpenGL and Vulkan), C++ video codecs etc, on many OS’s, all this for over 25 years professionally, I must admit I have no clue about the articles technology stack, programming techniques, languages, or architecture. Am I completely out of touch with this industry?

Don't worry, it's just the same the other way around :)
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