It's hard to believe, but this person's code is so convoluted, it makes my head hurt. I've seen a lot, but this takes the cake.
The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
261–270 of 385 posts
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#262The 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.
This is true for more than dev productivity.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
So on one hand, you're kinda right. HN is filled with exaggeration (imo often justified) from people venting because they have to deal with the bad parts of this system all day. That seems natural in a dev filled space. But I don't think your comment is fair. > We’re told of the engineer who isn’t hired by Google because he can’t invert a binary tree. Everyone else piles on and decree that, yes indeed, you cannot mea…
My wider point is not that the way companies are run is perfect and that we should stop the “innovators” (to quote the sibling comment). Each of these examples speak of corporate dysfunction, but we never give any weight to the constraints that force them in place. Leetcode is bad, but it’s bad in the sense that it errs too heavily on filtering out false negatives - the cheaper of the two errors. The alternative is w…
> Leetcode is bad, but it’s bad in the sense that it errs too heavily on filtering out false negatives
But, it doesn't. It filters for something orthogonal to development, which is ability to obsess over clever algorithmic solutions. Ok, well my company does HackerRank instead of LeetCode, maybe LeetCode is magically better, but I'm not seeing anything that tells me someone who grinds LeetCode is actually going to be useful on my team.
Look, you want an idiot check to make sure someone is actually able to code, fine. That's probably a good idea. But the number of stories on here about people being turned away because they hadn't run into a particular tricky algorithm problem is concerning.
> Giving Tim the benefit of the doubt in this story, it still holds true that for every extraordinary and invisible superstar like Tim there are 99 under-performers who are indistinguishable from him.
But they aren't indistinguishable. The author of the blog post was perfectly able to distinguish them. That's my point. There are plenty of ways to be able to distinguish them, this metric just isn't one of them. Because it's a bad metric.
It may not be legible to the higher ups, but good lower level managers have no problem distinguishing good unconventional people, and under-performers.
> We need to empathise with our managers and the processes in our organisations to understand their purpose and how they came to be.
I do empathize with the managers, at least the lower level ones. That's why I advocated for putting them in complete control and giving them unilateral firing privileges and increasing their pay.
> the best organisations that I’ve worked with used metrics in a very effective way (mostly in start ups). The worst did too.
You're really making it sound like metrics (at least as traditionally practiced in software) are orthogonal to being a good organization. If that's true, we might want to re-think how much time we spend on them and how much money we spend capturing them.
Now, if you want to use profit, adoption, or user satisfaction as metrics, I'd love to talk about that, but I've seen nothing in my experience in the corporate world that tells me that the way we're currently using them is even net positive value.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dangerous opinion is that the purpose of a company is to provide a living for its employees.
As in, if you are on the ship, we can absolutely find something for you to do. Here, color the fucking map, clean the sails. Why would we throw them off the ship?
That's another angle of what I mean, but absolutely. Stop expecting everyone to be above average, use your human resources intelligently, put people where they're productive and happy, and stop chasing nonstop growth. Mostly the last one. If we recalibrate our expectations about growth, I think we could tame the boom/bust cycle.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of meaningless statement though. Even if they do, which Im not sure is true in general case because you have to be good yourself to know who’s really good, they are not telling you anyway.
In every organization I've worked in, everyone knew who the productive and non-productive people were. Just like in school. Everyone knew who the good teachers were, and who the good students were. I don't fathom how you can work with other people and not be aware of it.
Frankly, I think you might be confusing "productive" with "smart" or "easy to work with". I've had several past team mates at several companies gush to me about staff eng Bob and while I agreed Bob was a cool guy (or just talked good game) I also knew his last few projects were a failure, it was 100% his fault, and management took notice. It happened in the other direction too but not as often. Alternatively you might be underestimating how oblivious some (most?) people are of those things.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#266I would guess at least 80% of the people who look like this Tim are contributing zero if not negative. I think there are good odds the actual Tim in the story was too. I mean I'd certainly love to do just the fun part of my job and duck out of all the scut work, if I could find a team that let me.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#267The 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…
This reminds me a bit of how VCs bet on a bunch of startups in full knowledge that many will fail. The failures in some sense get a “free ride”. Why not the same with people?
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#268The 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…
Sure, as long as they don't have any responsibilities. I've been a great performer at some companies and a poor performer at others, including one that kept me around without letting me have any responsibilities. It was not good for me. But I have been through worse.
A better alternative I've seen is to help the poor performer hunt for a new job.
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#269The 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…
Where I work, the CI pipelines measure changes in code coverage.
If I refactor repetitive code into something more concise and maintainable —- code coverage goes DOWN! (Now the proportion of untested code is larger!)
Yeah, measurement is hard…
Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Vibe coding works for experienced developers who give very detailed instructions including edge cases and potential issues or solutions. It is almost code already as it has already included all important code business logic (leaving the simple parts for Ai to fill in ). It is a maintenance disaster for junior developers or non-coders.