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The worst programmer I know

dannorth.net

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Re: The worst programmer I know

#21

Post by eesmith »

bee_rider wrote: post #15
3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Well, I like the story here, but it's kinda against a bit of a strawman. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing the overall point of the piece, a point I agree with, but that said a metrics focussed manager could have simply added an "adjunct" label to the stories and had this "worst programmer" add themselves to stories as the non-lead developer. Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the ass…

I believe that’s the conventional approach in Python, though? It is a duck-typing language, try-except is a legitimate way of seen if an operator works on an object, and objects should do sensible things with operators. The funny example is that the hasattr built-in just tries to getattr, and then catches the exception to tell if it has the attribute.

I agree. In Python terms "Easier to Ask for Forgiveness than Permission" (EAFP) is preferred over "Look Before You Leap" (LBYL).

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-EAFP comments:

> Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. This common Python coding style assumes the existence of valid keys or attributes and catches exceptions if the assumption proves false. This clean and fast style is characterized by the presence of many try and except statements. The technique contrasts with the LBYL style common to many other languages such as C.

and there are any number of essays on the topic, like (random DDG search) https://programmingduck.com/articles/lbyl-eafp .

Re: The worst programmer I know

#22

Post by closewith »

jongjong wrote: post #18

It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…

In a remote world, can that person exist?

Re: The worst programmer I know

#23

Post by closewith »

88913527 wrote: post #19
jongjong wrote: post #18

It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…

Because it's a bogus argument. The productive person doesn't need a paper weight at lunch to act as a shower thought generator. Management can get it wrong sometimes, but in broad strokes, they're right.

Maybe, or maybe human endeavour is more complex than individual efforts.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#24

Post by zug_zug »

3pt14159 wrote: post #10

Well, I like the story here, but it's kinda against a bit of a strawman. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing the overall point of the piece, a point I agree with, but that said a metrics focussed manager could have simply added an "adjunct" label to the stories and had this "worst programmer" add themselves to stories as the non-lead developer. Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the ass…

So I used to kind of think like you, but I think that's just not a practical approach. Yes, you could alter the system in this 1 exact situation if you know exactly what to change, but there will be dozens of other failure modes too (engineer releases code that breaks in 2 months, engineer deliberately mis-estimates story points, engineer doesn't comment their code so that nobody else on team can do certain work, etc)

So if you have a manager who is a dialed-in coder who's going to keep updating the jira-point formula based on spending more than 1 hour a day reading code, and keep tuning it around the ever-more creative loopholes engineers employ, then yes, you may end up with a workable system. But never yet in my long career have I seen that.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#25

Post by Erikun »

jamestimmins wrote: post #4

Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.

It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135).

  'In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.'

Re: The worst programmer I know

#27

Post by bee_rider »

tjpnz wrote: post #14
TheDong wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey, boss who can fire me, I just thought you should know that we on the team have started keeping metrics. I want you to know that your 'times you made the only girl on the team uncomfortable with a sexist joke' metric is unusually high this month, and your 'unblocked the team by speeding up an external request' metric is 0 for this month, down from 3 times last month" Let me know if you find any downsides. Anyway,…

The logical conclusion to that argument is that we should do away with the lot of them.

We all feel like management contributes nothing, right? But they seem to always be around successful companies. I dunno, correlation isn’t causation, but I think there must be something there.

Re: The worst programmer I know

#28

Post by rexpop »

commonlisp94 wrote: post #11
ruined wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's called a labor union

unions don't measure productivity. They group people based on credentials + experience, and treat everyone as interchangeable within those buckets.

That's one possible union architecture, sure, but you're missing the forest for the trees. A union offers job security to reduce the risk of "managing up."

Re: The worst programmer I know

#29

Post by eesmith »

roenxi wrote: post #7

I dislike the just-so aspect of these sort of stories. I'd expect exceptional programmers to do unusually well on most metrics. But that is balanced by the threat of people trying to use metrics to measure developer productivity. It doesn't seem to be possible, any metric falls apart. If people are focusing on a metric, the greats aren't going to be leading any more. It'll be some junior who has misunderstood the sys…

> I'd expect exceptional programmers to do unusually well on most metrics.

Not if they game the metrics, as a way to force change.

A classic example of an exceptional programmer doing worse on a (bad) metric is at https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... , titled "-2000 Lines Of Code".

"Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. ... Bill Atkinson ... thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. ... [He] made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. ... when it was time to fill out the management form ... he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. ... after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

Re: The worst programmer I know

#30

Post by chaxor »

tjpnz wrote: post #14
TheDong wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey, boss who can fire me, I just thought you should know that we on the team have started keeping metrics. I want you to know that your 'times you made the only girl on the team uncomfortable with a sexist joke' metric is unusually high this month, and your 'unblocked the team by speeding up an external request' metric is 0 for this month, down from 3 times last month" Let me know if you find any downsides. Anyway,…

The logical conclusion to that argument is that we should do away with the lot of them.

AI is actually now shaping up to replace these jobs much more simply than blue collar work.

So, yes absolutely, administrative work now can finally be replaced, and we can free up all the tormented souls in these managerial positions to do something more meaningful with their lives.

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