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The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

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Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#371

Post by rvba »

hansmayer wrote: post #276
rvba wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 manage…

Sorry but what is your point? I feel like you got offended by identifying yourself in it, but did not really understand it. My point being, as a non-engineering manager, you can be great at 1) approving holidays 2) doing a bit of project management 3) doing formal 1:1s . But it does not mean much because you don´t understand the work being done and you are just doing performative actions, e.g. busywork. Or we just sa…

Only an engineer with 30 years of experience can tell that a Mustang is better than a Model T /s

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#372

Post by hansmayer »

rvba wrote: post #371
hansmayer wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but what is your point? I feel like you got offended by identifying yourself in it, but did not really understand it. My point being, as a non-engineering manager, you can be great at 1) approving holidays 2) doing a bit of project management 3) doing formal 1:1s . But it does not mean much because you don´t understand the work being done and you are just doing performative actions, e.g. busywork. Or we just sa…

Only an engineer with 30 years of experience can tell that a Mustang is better than a Model T /s

Why the /s? You're mixing apples and oranges I am afraid. Being a consumer of some product, is not the same as engineering the product. So you have the latest iPhone, good for you - still does not make you an engineer, nor do you have a clue what goes into designing, conceptualising and building a product. And yes, those of us with a bit more experience in the field, remember the times when engineering was done by people who had passion for it, not people desperate to make a career and income upgrade through bullshitting in meetings. For engineering a great product, as we can see with the great entshittification of pretty much everything today, Boeing being the most dangerous example, it's not just that the performative workers are being a drag on productivity and profitability, they are now also endangering everyone. I sure hope some idiot MBA does not come up with an idea of a medical PO or scrum master.

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#373

Post by paradox460 »

asdf6969 wrote: post #209
renewedrebecca wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think just about everybody has had to deal with one or several of these guys.

> Story is about changing the font size on the home page? He'd fail it because he wasn't able to log in (he tested while the auth service was undergoing planned maintenance). Average offshore QA team.

This guy had offshore mentally but sat 3 desks away from me

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#374

Post by rvba »

hansmayer wrote: post #372
rvba wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only an engineer with 30 years of experience can tell that a Mustang is better than a Model T /s

Why the /s? You're mixing apples and oranges I am afraid. Being a consumer of some product, is not the same as engineering the product. So you have the latest iPhone, good for you - still does not make you an engineer, nor do you have a clue what goes into designing, conceptualising and building a product. And yes, those of us with a bit more experience in the field, remember the times when engineering was done by pe…

One does not need 20 years of programming experience to identify and fire a shitty employee that coasts by constantly asking others for help with their job. There are tons of bad programmers just like there are tons of people bad at other jobs. Those employees are often a net negative for the team by constantly wasting someone elses' time.

On a side note, your constant whining about "MBAs" and "scrum masters"... it does not make you sound like a professional or reasonable person. This black-white view of world, that "all MBAs are bad". Whoa.

(Just because I know where you will take it: (sadly?) I dont have an MBA. I am also not a scrum master)

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#375

Post by hackburg »

ArthurStacks wrote: post #281
glouwbug wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might it be that he’s so good everyone comes to him first and not you?

I would not hire him in my business regardless of how 'good' he thinks he is. I'm interested in people who can get work done.

[dead]

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#376

Post by hansmayer »

rvba wrote: post #374
hansmayer wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the /s? You're mixing apples and oranges I am afraid. Being a consumer of some product, is not the same as engineering the product. So you have the latest iPhone, good for you - still does not make you an engineer, nor do you have a clue what goes into designing, conceptualising and building a product. And yes, those of us with a bit more experience in the field, remember the times when engineering was done by pe…

One does not need 20 years of programming experience to identify and fire a shitty employee that coasts by constantly asking others for help with their job. There are tons of bad programmers just like there are tons of people bad at other jobs. Those employees are often a net negative for the team by constantly wasting someone elses' time. On a side note, your constant whining about "MBAs" and "scrum masters"... it d…

No, please, instead of pointing out everything that is wrong in your reasoning: Please read a referent book about managing software development teams. For example "Peopleware", or "Dynamics of Software Development". Both a bit older, but valuable classics. The second one actually written by a relatively less technical author, a product manager at Microsoft. Maybe then you'll understand a bit more. By the way - I am not the only one complaining about the MBAs. Remember when that plane door fell off? US Congress was holding a hearing about that. And a number of US Congressmen (or were they senators?), people who literally never have the discussions that you and are having, kept asking one simple question: "How come the CEO of Boeing is not an ENGINEER"? It's so natural, that even those disconnected politicians made the obvious connection. Look it up in the archives.

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#377

Post by mierz00 »

milesrout wrote: post #294
hamburglar wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last gig I spent the last year and a half as staff engineer and made almost no commits because I was constantly writing proposals, defending them to execs, doing architecture reviews, doing design consultations, and planning long term responses to large incidents. I know for a fact that I brought a ton of value to the company but it was very uncoupled to commits. I didn’t really like it because I need to code,…

Writing proposals, doing architecture reviews and doing design consultations sounds to me largely like busywork and bureaucracy rather than real and productive work. Maybe in a business where the cost of iteration is very high, it makes sense to do this. But in a good business you should not be doing architecture reviews and writing proposals, you should be doing refactoring and creating prototypes, respectively.

Software doesn’t live in a bubble.

Architecture reviews ensure that there is some strategy on how things are being solved at an organisational level.

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#378

Post by failrate »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #357
failrate wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the ci/cd guy. I am not exaggerating when I say this person's code just would not compile and they would not test locally.

An intermediate state on their own branch maybe not such a big deal. But did they regularly initiate pull requests on on broken branch ?

P4, not git.

Re: The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

#379

Post by SJC_Hacker »

failrate wrote: post #378
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intermediate state on their own branch maybe not such a big deal. But did they regularly initiate pull requests on on broken branch ?

P4, not git.

I've never used perforce but it seems git can this problem at least
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