Guilty Developer Syndrome • Hacker News Board

Re: Guilty Developer Syndrome

#11

Post by mgkimsal » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 9:39 PM UTC

The examples given so far don't necessarily translate to situations where I feel devs should feel guilty/bad, but there are situations, and I've left some messes behind in my day, often which I wasn't aware of at the time. I've taken over projects where the dev(s) should have known better, and in some cases did know better than what they delivered.

If you never feel guilty/bad about any code you've ever left behind - never - there's something wrong with you. You shouldn't go through life apologizing for every line of code either, but there's a balance to be struck somewhere that probably shifts over time.

Re: Guilty Developer Syndrome

#12

Post by alinajaf » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 10:19 PM UTC

Paring helps to alleviate this guilt to some degree. By hashing out technical decisions with at least one other reasonably intelligent person and coming to an agreement, you can have just a little bit more confidence than if you were working on your own.

Re: Guilty Developer Syndrome

#13

Post by j_baker » Sun, Feb 19, 2012, 11:33 PM UTC

Guilty developer syndrome is arguably a good thing. The reason being that having it means a developer doesn't have Nothing's Wrong, Everything Is OK Syndrome. That's the one you have to watch out for.

Re: Guilty Developer Syndrome

#14

Post by sopooneo » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 3:25 AM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #10

DanielN wrote: post #5

I've had this feeling before and I've worked with people who express this feeling. My question is, what is the alternative to having this feeling. You want to show that you are now knowledgable of better methods and you would like the criticizer to recognize that your mistakes are not ones that you are still making. Furthermore, you can't really blame the criticizer, they're just trying to help you become a better pr…

The alternative is to be a smug overconfident jerk who trots out outdated or sometimes entirely wrong justifications for ill considered design decisions. The alternative is being a developer who continues to do things day after day in bash and C because Perl and Python are "too heavyweight". Feeling guilty shows that you've grown and that you know more today than you did when you built the system you're feeling guilt…

There is a rational middle ground.

Re: Guilty Developer Syndrome

#15

Post by jakejake » Mon, Feb 20, 2012, 6:36 AM UTC

singular wrote: post #8

jakejake wrote: post #3

What seems to happen with me is that I'm fairly happy with the initial release. Then as the changes start piling on, eventually one of them will require a major conceptual change. Of course that could take months, or you can put a band-aid on in 2 days. In this day and age of startup mentality I don't know many programmers who are afforded the luxury to spend months on a task that can be hacked in a few days. Anyway,…

This, to me, has a lot to do with the languages and tools used on a project - the more 'locked in' to a structure you are, the bigger that cost will be when something changes. This has been a concern of mine w.r.t. oop as implemented in C# (and by extension java), as the structure can be very costly to change down the line when the inevitable 'pivot' in implementation occurs.

True and it seems like no matter how much foresight I have and how much abstraction we code in, eventually some change comes along that nobody saw coming.