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You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

mrlacey.com

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Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#181

Post by [deleted] »

ftio wrote: post #89
caymanjim wrote: post #31

A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see som…

Early in my career, I learned a simple 'demo day' rule: never demo things that aren't end-to-end done. When you do, it can easily confuse folks who aren't deeply involved in your project ("haven't I seen this already?") and can hurt team morale because they never get a "shipped it" moment that feels good. More to the point: enforcing this rule incentivizes teams to build things in small, shippable components. Nobody…

[deleted]

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#183

Post by twodave »

msclrhd wrote: post #101
zabzonk wrote: post #50

Nobody should manage programmers who is not themselves a very experienced programmer. Otherwise, you are in Dilbert Country.

The tricky part of this is that not all programmers make good managers, or want to be promoted into management. They are different skill sets. That said, having a basic understanding of the difficulties and things that take time (learning new technology, investigating/debugging an issue, etc.) would be a good thing to have as a manager. Also, being able to assist where possible -- asking if the developer needs someon…

I mean, is it really this hard? This is not a good/bad manager problem to me, this is an organizational culture kind of problem. As a manager I'd expect my three top priorities to be ensuring enough devs are on the team, communicating priorities effectively, and unblocking the devs on the team as needed.

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#184

Post by runawaybottle »

duderific wrote: post #131
kevsim wrote: post #5

Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.

They don't always make the comment out loud, but you can tell they're thinking it. They absolutely use lines of code metric at my company. I don't miss any chance to tell my manager it's complete bullshit. His answer: "Engineers are supposed to write code, just like construction workers are supposed to build houses."

Can you please help your brothers out and hint at what company this is so we can all avoid?

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#185

Post by lmilcin »

Hindsight is 20/20.

It takes more work to produce succinct code and it can take surprising amount of effort and care to land at a simple solution to a complex problem.

My solution is to try to involve other people in my "process". This helps me transfer some knowledge of the decision process, helps debug ideas early on and hopefully is useful mentoring for the team.

I can do this because I am senior engineer / tech lead at my org. For other engineers I highly recommend pair programming and constantly rotate developer pairs so that everybody can get some appreciation of everybody else.

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#186

Post by Softcadbury »

baddox wrote: post #138
caymanjim wrote: post #31

A variant of this that has driven me to quit more than one job is having a non-technical manager look at a UI prototype and consider that 90% of the solution. "The UI guys had this page ready two months ago! Why doesn't this work yet?" It's even worse when you present a working prototype. They simply don't understand that the backend functionality is what's doing the bulk of the work, and just because you can see som…

Not even just the backend! Frontend interactivity itself can be very complicated, and it generally is not fully specified by design (do your design specs come with state machines?) A few things that are often missing from a Figma/similar are things like error states, loading states, handling longer text content than the mockup, and responsive design.

And you can add paging, empty states, accessibility, security, browser compatibility...

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#188

Post by throwaway_dcnt »

tdrp wrote: post #136

We had a non-tech lead at some point (although his title was something like development manager) and he would praise my coworker for how many check-ins he did. Except that coworker would do things like: 1- Copy-paste an entire class into a new class and change a single constant in it, because he was too lazy to do inheritance. 2- "Solve" multiple bugs a day that he had introduced himself the day before. 3- Loudly com…

That word (imposter syndrome) does not mean what you think it does :)

Re: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

#189

Post by MauranKilom »

duderific wrote: post #131
kevsim wrote: post #5

Do people actually have fights like this with management at their companies? Not trying to knock the author, but I'm just surprised anyone would actually hear this kind of comment in 2020. I'd think by now any and all metrics tying lines of code to productivity would be long dead.

They don't always make the comment out loud, but you can tell they're thinking it. They absolutely use lines of code metric at my company. I don't miss any chance to tell my manager it's complete bullshit. His answer: "Engineers are supposed to write code, just like construction workers are supposed to build houses."

"If you wanted someone who writes as many lines as possible, you should have hired a secretary."
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