This strategy might work with ego driven programmers, but I don't really want any of those guys on my team in the first place. I want perfectionists who know how to ship.
Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#12I don't understand why the general opinion here is so negative. Having this kind of competition means people _reading_ each other's code, and this alone is worth gold. Some friendly rewriting can't possibly hurt. After all, this is what open source is about, and it definitely works.
Of course, engineering competition has a lot of chances to backfire, but everything can be taken too far.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#13"Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks." Wrong. This doesn't motivate. It just pisses me off.
Presumably, they should tell you you should rewrite your code because it sucks?
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#14"Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks." Wrong. This doesn't motivate. It just pisses me off.
What if there is an error or bottleneck which really counts? To say "it sucks" is rude and a very wrong way to tell but sometimes a fresh eye founds real things in code and it's a bad policy not to tell. Most of the people take it as piss off for sure but still...
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#15Well, it all depends. I would agree with the main premise - that a little friendly competition is motivational, but the operative words are - wait, that didn't come out right - "a little", and "friendly competition". I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that, since I don't feel like / have time to tune it. If somebody fixes it I'm always interested to know how he did it in the forme…
> I trust my code to be optimal, or I know where it isn't and leave it at that That's a pretty remarkable claim, unless you religiously profile all of your code.
Well, it's optimal, not optimized. So let me re-phrase that in a way that's more realistic - I trust my algorithm choice to be optimal, and my code expresses those algorithms in a simple way, which get a good speed to cleanness ratio. :)
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#16It's funny that the comments here are so negative, and yet, in the real world, this effect proves true over and over again. For example, I've noticed that sometimes you'll have a team of developers just collecting a paycheck, and when a new guy comes on who's hypermotivated, the motivation of the entire team increases. It's just a fact of life that a very large number of people, including developers, often operate at…
A good programmer is one who writes good code because their personality requires them to write good code.
If you need to resort to competition games, you don't have the right people.
I have been in a situation of yelling at my technical lead to write less good code ("That won't work for the general case" "I don't care about the general case! Special case it so we can get it out the door!" "No! That's just wrong!" "I don't care!" etc etc). I'd much rather deal with that than having to play mindgames to get people to do the right thing.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#17Uhh. No. One of my best CS professors used to say: "Competition is for horses" The _right_ way to motivate your hackers is to give them interesting stuff to do so that you can watch as they fall in love with the stuff they're doing and achieve inhuman-seeming goals fueled by caffeine and pure joy for their work. Not some stupid motivational analogy from "a quality control manager in a hospital".
Nailed it.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#18It's funny that the comments here are so negative, and yet, in the real world, this effect proves true over and over again. For example, I've noticed that sometimes you'll have a team of developers just collecting a paycheck, and when a new guy comes on who's hypermotivated, the motivation of the entire team increases. It's just a fact of life that a very large number of people, including developers, often operate at…
Just because we don't like it and it really gets under our skin, doesn't mean that it does not work.
However, I do not suggest using it as a management technique. There is regular performance and adrenaline-based performance. The latter is not likely to happen full-time.
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#19but what about when the 'interesting' stuff dries up and the new priority is building tedious features that your users want?
Re: Coding Horror: How to Motivate Programmers
#20"Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they're rewriting your code because it sucks." Wrong. This doesn't motivate. It just pisses me off.
Presumably, they should tell you you should rewrite your code because it sucks?
No.
Presumably:
1. My code doesn't suck (with rare exceptions). I know that. Why don't they?
2. What is the definition of "sucks"? Doesn't meet some other requirement that no one has agreed upon. Doesn't meet some other requirement that hasn't been identified? Has bugs? Runs slow? Is indented 2 spaces instead of 3?
3. Even if the code did suck, that doesn't automatically mean it should be rewritten.
4. Even if it should be rewritten, that doesn't mean he should do it.
5. They should learn better people skills. If they were looking for trouble, they found it.