even though this post puts in a good word for tim, calling him out and putting his linkedin in a post with this title is crazy
The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
211–220 of 385 posts
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
First off - please do not be offended by the following comment, there is zero bad intent in it and is only meant as a way of nudging you into a correct mindset about the problem you described. Based on your public profile, you seem to not have much in the way of hands-on technical background and I suspect you manage your team based on some set of scrum/agile techniques. It can work purely for project delivery I suppo…
One of the members of the team is barely doing anything and survives by constantly asking others to help with doing the job. This reducea productivity of other employees.
A known archetype in many jobs, not only programming.
Yet we get comments like this:
> you don´t have the necessary competence to validate your suspicion about one of them not getting work done, coasting off of others
Wow.
In any other job, a manager ir HR will just read your chats, emails + demand to document calls - and guess what. It can be found. In a very not very subtle way.
Also the problem above is like managememt 101? For all the talk about "no technical competence" you dont seem to have any managerial competence.
Also the agile idea that developers keep each other to professional standars is a nice fairy tale (like whole agile in general).
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's sad that you get downvoted for providing solutions.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You sound like a manager. Yeah, I think that's a good read. Give management credit for being smart. They mostly do manage only to promote the most egregiously avid Taylorites from among us.
> Give management credit for being smart. Respectfully, this is being the exact opposite of smart. Pay attention to the fact that by all accounts the Tim role is actually a force multiplier and output booster for the team. Pay also attention to the fact that you're arguing that Tim should be fired as should the whole team just because... Your Jira metrics are off? This is not what I would call being smart, by far.
You assume management optimizes poorly for desiderata you share.
You also assume by "smart" I intend no pejoration.
Were you to hear me speak these words, rather than read them as here typed, the latter point at least would need no clarification. Unfortunately, text like this is salt without savor.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#215I agree with a couple other comments here -- this is a bizarre model where one programmer does no individual work and does all the helping. A much healthier situation, to me, is one where Tim does stories like everybody else, and when people need help they ask the group and whoever is the best at that thing helps them -- or whoever hasn't helped in a while. Surely there are easier stories for those who need the most…
> shouldn't they just be a special kind of team lead who is expected to mentor full-time and not be subject to metrics?
It sounds like this was precisely the situation, and the author's company did indeed take this very action, in response to seeing the data. So, what is your complaint?
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who was writing the most code There's yer problem right there. Code quantity is not correlated with value. In fact, it can be negatively correlated with value if it's buggy and laden with technical debt. Measuring productivity by lines of code produced actively discourages writing clean, maintainable, bug-free code.
> Code quantity is not correlated with value. In fact, it can be negatively correlated with value if it's buggy and laden with technical debt. ** "No Code" or Nihilist Software Engineering ** No code runs faster than no code. No code has fewer bugs than no code. No code uses less memory than no code. No code is easier to understand than no code. No code is the best way to have secure and reliable applications. Write…
The author of the shell script was probably Doug McIlroy. See www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ for more.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#217The 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…
Could a company keep a subjective poor performer on for the lifespan of the company? As in, what is the plus or minus in overall revenue or profit from this charity? What if all companies did that? Could we distribute the "burden" of the charity across all companies for a better society? My point is, I don't even know if metrics are good or bad, we may need to look at why we see each other like this. Is it so offensi…
Are you going to accept such free rider in your team? You will eventually do both your and his tasks but for the same or worse pay. Given you have a fixed budget for the team - do you want to split it more ways?
Where can I send a CV?
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#218Tims job seems perfect for me.
I like casually hanging around and telling people what they can do better. This usually results in me seeming unlikable, since I am so often pointing out mistakes.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I never tried vibe code as described in this article, but I could see where it breaks. Initially, code works. Eventually, there's a bug, and the LLM isn't able to fix it. At that stage, you're on your own with a potentially large codebase which is totally new to you. Even on small projects, sometimes I'm tired, I just try to get the LLM do some refactoring for me or write a couple of tests. First, whatever the LLM wr…
Yeah it's totally a situation where obviously I can write it myself if I had the time so I just correct it as it goes. I also give it lots of guidelines on what I'm looking for but after some setup I can just watch TV and check on it every couple minutes.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#220Hmm, I wonder what Paul Erdos was doing in mathematics
Was he the cross-pollinating bee of math?