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Ego-Driven Development

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Re: Ego-Driven Development

#11

Post by Osiris »

lmm wrote: post #6

I used to apply the Joel test religiously, but I've gradually come to the opinion that dedicated QA is a net negative. It creates a natural opposition between two halves of what should be the same team, and removes the focus that comes from knowing that what you create will be what's deployed. It also adds friction that goes against the agile "deploy early, deploy often" approach.

Anecdotally, I can say that I've seen the issue with QA causing code deployments to take far longer than they should. For example, right now we have code (one small feature) that QA wants almost two full weeks to test. I was just telling one of our QAs that I hope we start getting much better automated test coverage so that manual QA time can be brought down to a much more reasonable day or two before releasing code to the public.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#13

Post by OldSchool »

Hmm, just playing devil's advocate here but I'll bet that a huge list of successful people topped by the obvious like Gates, Zuckerberg, and even the humble Wozniak have used all of these elements some or most of the time in their development lives :)

Generational differences abound and manifest in management trends as people reach an age of influence. Born in the 50/60's - you're more likely to be a lone-wolf type. Born in the 80's/90's and you probably consider teamwork and connectedness to be instinctual. Not claiming either is correct but certainly projects beyond a certain scale can only be completed by a structured team. Too, those who prefer to work alone are not automatically egomaniacs.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#14

Post by bajsejohannes »

> developers and managers repeatedly act as if established best practices do not apply to them

... and rightly so. A junior programmer might be better off always following "established best practices", but I expect any developer worth their salt to be able to know when to break the rules.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#15

Post by JackMorgan »

OldSchool wrote: post #13

Hmm, just playing devil's advocate here but I'll bet that a huge list of successful people topped by the obvious like Gates, Zuckerberg, and even the humble Wozniak have used all of these elements some or most of the time in their development lives :) Generational differences abound and manifest in management trends as people reach an age of influence. Born in the 50/60's - you're more likely to be a lone-wolf type.…

You are certainly correct that there is probably a huge list of successful people who have used these elements, and that is fine, but that doesn't mean I want to work for them! I have heard people say working at Apple is horrific, as that ego is permeated into everything they do. Sure they (used to) turn out great work, but at the cost of a terrible work environment. Check out the book Good to Great http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great#Seven_characteris..., notice that first thing? Humble leaders. Notice what is happening to Apple lately without that massive ego whipping them onward?

As to the generational differences, I had not noticed only the older devs wanting to "cowboy" while the younger devs "cooperate". Usually, it has been a variety of both doing both. I will have to keep my eye on that though.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#16

Post by fabrizioc1 »

There is the other side of "NIH syndrome".

In order to "save development time" and implement "best practices" a company decides to use an "out of the shelf" package from a big name vendor (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc) and customize it to their needs. Some initial customization is done and some shortcuts are taken to make the project go live.

Fast forward a couple of years. The custom code added by the company complicates upgrade paths and vendor support. The business demands more and more functionality which the package does not support "out of the box".

The customization initially implemented turns out to have been technical debt in disguise. They bypassed the recommended usage of the package or platform which resulted in performance problems. Eventually they end up having to re-work everything "the right way" in order to get vendor support or fix the performance problems.

This is specially prevalent in corporate IT departments in large corporations.

Moral of the story is that "off the shelf" platforms are not a silver bullet. If you don't understand the platform and the business requirements you will have problems later on.

I don't know how many times I've fixed performance problems of "off the shelf" packages by simply writing code which replaces the OOB code with a couple of SQL queries/stored procedures and only does what the business needs, bypassing features which the customer does not need in the present.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#17

Post by JackMorgan »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #14

> developers and managers repeatedly act as if established best practices do not apply to them ... and rightly so. A junior programmer might be better off always following "established best practices", but I expect any developer worth their salt to be able to know when to break the rules .

> developers and managers repeatedly act as if established best practices do not apply to them, to the detriment of their organization

If it isn't really a detriment, I'd say its not really EDD. EDD can also be just blindly following best practices past the point of utility.

Re: Ego-Driven Development

#20

Post by mgkimsal »

scottschulthess wrote: post #5

""Not Invented Here" syndrome: Expressed most commonly in a desire for everything needed to be developed in house. E.g.: “Need a CMS? Let’s make our own from scratch!” Perhaps, you work at a place where all your teammates do is constantly bring you bad ideas. Are they really all terrible? Or are only your ideas good enough for the organization? Not Invented Here can also apply to your own head, not just the organizat…

re: CMS.

Often I don't need a "Content Management System", but I need a way to "Manage Content". The 'system' part is... pretty much in every situation I've seen, a straightjacket with little room to be extended, or something which requires a lot of time/effort to be proficient with. I've still not yet found a good middle ground.

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