How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

Here's a profile of a developer:

- Easy going and pleasant.

- Really interested in programming and tech in general

- Talks intelligently about the problem at hand. Asks all the right questions. Agrees a plan of action in collaboration with colleagues.

- Creates systems that definitely appear to work

- Code looks pretty sane. Structure is right. Style seems good.

- Always very responsive to problems. Jumps straight on them.

- Every problem fixed another one seems to pop up.

- Eventually you dig into the code and problem space in detail and you find that in a very subtle, even complex way the whole thing is completely wrong, the problem space misunderstood and everything patched over with little fixes to get things working for a particular case.

In the end no system created by the person is useable without major remediation by another developer.

Anyone experienced this?

I relate to this.

I think one of the symptoms is not picking up enough detailed understanding of anything because you keep moving around and don't believe in most external knowledge anyway (eg. don't want to learn [beyond a certain depth] SQL, it's so ugly on some inner level I'd much rather start with datalog and build my own up, don't want to learn economics I don't trust those science cargo-culters). But the other reason you don't want to specialize is that it would be to accept a limit on yourself (OK I'm going to get specialize on getting very good at c++, my upper salary cap is 500k and likely cap 200k, career is mapped out).

One of the things that's slowly curing me I think is running into examples of systems that are genuinely very heavy to understand/improve, and examples of people who are just unarguably higher ceiling in different ways than you.

eg. go watch a SGM play 30 second hyperbullet chess, I don't think I have either the memory or raw processing speed to do what they do, ever. If those guys exist a lot of other people have way higher ceilings. Also realize that chess (and by extension must be a lot of other activities) rely on both a crazy cpu, an amazing memory and an insanely built-out internal database of positions and ideas, and since my cpu is good but not unbelievable, my memory is nothing special and my time is limited there must be a lot of activities I'll never really be good at. Also just getting older and staying unsuccessful relative to your ego, you just start to compromise I think.

I have been concerned about occupying a similar space myself. The great secret that we all do well to remember is that being humble is simply a matter of practicing being humble. In particular, when I treat other team members as experts in what they do, and trust that they'll value me for whatever it is that I do, I become much more efficient, and feel more relaxed too. Yes, there are still times that I notice myself acting vain, but these days a few slow, grounding breaths goes a long way toward resetting me.

In fact, I wonder if the narcissism you speak of might have more to do with insecurity, deep down. In my experience, when I see myself taking a behavior that I consciously am against, the cause tends to be emotional and the solution tends to be to gently, curiously observe those situations and start questioning how I feel. When I love and take care of my emotional world, it becomes way easier to interact in a way I feel is more optimal on the fly.

My version of #9 I'm dealing with is: Is this an feature that a customer will use? Or is it internal improvement? Yes to first, no to latter.

I read the article and thought to myself that there's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in my coworkers. :) Fwiw, I think articles like there are really bullshit. They just make self-doubting people doubt themselves even more and the real assholes never understands that the advice applies to them.