121–130 of 385 posts
The worst programmer I know literally could not go a day without either checking in code that did not compile or saying something creepy and sexual in a large open plan office, and we all worked together to get them fired.
Have no idea on the second, other than a visit from HR.
The idea of measuring individual developer productivity is kind of absurd to me. I'm not saying that what we do is magic, there are just so many variables. Measuring story points or lines of code is kind of the opposite of productivity. This encourages developers to do as much meaningless work as possible. I'd want a developer to make a task simpler or use an existing tool which means less time writing code. The valu…
Dev productivity is like quantum mechanics. The second you try to measure it, the wave function collapses, and you've fundamentally altered the thing you were trying to measure. That said, at every place I've worked you could get a starting point idea of who the top devs were by looking at overall code commits. This Tim sensei situation may be more common than I think, but I've never run into it.
The idea of measuring individual developer productivity is kind of absurd to me. I'm not saying that what we do is magic, there are just so many variables. Measuring story points or lines of code is kind of the opposite of productivity. This encourages developers to do as much meaningless work as possible. I'd want a developer to make a task simpler or use an existing tool which means less time writing code. The valu…
the worst programmer nowadays is the vibe coder. vibe coding is so overrated imo https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
Used to be bitten by stuff like this until I figured out something Tim and this author apparently didn’t - the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. he can ask his teammates to do this and they gladly will, or, nice teammates will usually throw a “figured this out with the help of @Tim” in the ticket. goes a long way to keep “tim” on your team again…
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I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a good solution. It’s one amongst many bad ones that are used because that’s what we have. For example, I’ve been running a remote team for 8ish years now and I keep begging people to have conversations in public channels. One of the reasons is to see who’s spending a lot of time lending a hand. Guess what, devs refuse to do that. So what am I supposed to do? I have a person who I…
> "I keep begging people to have conversations in public channels... Guess what, devs refuse to do that." So, stop begging. Managerial directives come as orders, not pretty-please requests. Also, stop letting your subordinates refuse you. They are your reports, you are approving their money, that can change if they aren't doing their jobs. Fire one for ignoring policy, and their attitudes will change. On the tech sid…
Yeah, the next day they'll start updating their resumes and sending out feelers to their network.
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I'm actually shocked that Tim, himself, knowing the metric exists and was going to be used in firing decisions, did not attach himself to all these tickets in the first place. Talk about a lack of self-preservation. Everywhere I've seen that measures performance by some metric, everyone instinctively tries to pump that metric all by themselves. No other motivation required.
Not everyone will play the metrics games. Some people will just find the metrics dumb and depressing, and avoid them. (As might've happened in the article.) Some assume it will go away in time, or that their manager will cover for them. (As eventually happened in the article.) Some have behind-the-scenes talks with managers+execs+HR, to end bad metrics. Some will melt the metrics with the intensity of their look of d…
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the worst programmer nowadays is the vibe coder. vibe coding is so overrated imo https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
I've been writing code professionally for a decade but I've never written so much code in my free time because I can just vibe code it all. I wouldn't do it at work and I probably wouldn't trust a juniors vibes as much as my own but no tools have made me feel quite so powerful.
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> the problem is trivially fixed by management by attaching tim’s name to any tickets he may have helped out on. I don't think this comes even close to solving the problem. This in fact makes the problem worse, because a) you admit the metric is shit and does not reflect work, b) you opt to keep the bullshit metric but instead try to manipulate it to bump the score under some scenario. That's not desirable outcome by…
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a good solution. It’s one amongst many bad ones that are used because that’s what we have. For example, I’ve been running a remote team for 8ish years now and I keep begging people to have conversations in public channels. One of the reasons is to see who’s spending a lot of time lending a hand. Guess what, devs refuse to do that. So what am I supposed to do? I have a person who I…
Yea the best teams I've ever been on have always had someone like Tim. The best best teams I've been on, Tim's helpfulness osmoses onto other people, and instead of Tim always being the one, the process goes like this: 1. Dev gets stuck 2. Dev attempts to unstick self for appropriate amount of time given problem and probability of self-unsticking given resources (e.g. some stuff is easier to search for internally, or…
Good devs always do #2, bad devs skip it.
Maybe. There’s also folks that pair because they’re a crutch for one or two other engineers. The other engineers never improve or are let go, but softly slow down the team. There’s also the folks that pair because their code doesn’t make sense on its own. Or they have some config files they’ve refused to check into the repo, etc. Pairing makes them feel valuable.
I can imagine this happening if neither pair is all that good a communicator, and if the seniormost never employs a little Socratic dialog every now and then.