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You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

blog.lunarlogic.io

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Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#81

Post by tbrownaw »

Clubber wrote: post #64
crdoconnor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And the reason that "the code is self-documenting" is a bad smell is because in 3 months even the 'rock star' who wrote it won't remember without appropriate help That simply means you're working with poor developers.

So you've never written code and come back to it 6 months later said said to yourself, "why did I do this?"

There are two kinds of that.

One is "wtf was I thinking", which comments won't help with.

The other is "where did the requirement come from", and that's (1) not a "cock-sure of themselves" sort of thing; and (2) best solved by putting a tracking number on the commit message, rather than traditional code comments.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#82

Post by chrisco255 »

wmccullough wrote: post #59
GVIrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It depends so much on what you're building. If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. I think this is true for high risk, cutting edge tech, the problem is that A LOT of companies think what they're doing meets that definition when it really doesn't. They think their NoSQL datastore with 10 million records and a single…

>A LOT of companies think what they're doing meets that definition when it really doesn't. Can you back that up with data? The majority of companies in the US have zero problems hiring developers who aren't rockstars even when their business model is unique for their industry. My evidence is the disproportionate number of questions from developers on Stackoverflow asking things that they would know if they had a dece…

Honestly I think this is just a symptom of over optimism on any company's part. This is sort of like how everyone thinks they're better than average at driving. All companies want to believe they are better than average at hiring. They also "choose the best" when, really they're just choosing the best from their limited talent pool.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#84

Post by crdoconnor »

watwut wrote: post #74
crdoconnor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A developer may also fail in communicating how much time will something take Estimation is not a communication skill. >explaining clearly to pm why is feature harder to implement A PM is probably not interested and does not need to know why they just need to know that it is hard to implement. I've typically done that by assigning a number (1, 3, 5, etc.) to a story indicating its difficulty. If your communication pr…

People with bad communication skills often think they are communicating big estimate, while no one else in the room got it from what they said. It happens. Or they refuse to hear when someone suggests easier solution or change of requirements so that it can be done faster. Nope, showing the code is not enough to explain to other developers, unless we are talking about something extremely clear, simple and small. And…

>People with bad communication skills often think they are communicating big estimate, while no one else in the room got it from what they said.

I've literally never had this happen once during a planning meeting.

>Nope, showing the code is not enough to explain to other developers

It's always worked for me. I can read code, grasp the structure and spot code smells with a glance. If it's really bad I'll be able to tell.

Usually I will just trust the people I work with if they say "it's bad" though.

>And PM IS interested, good one that is.

Good PMs learn to stay out of technical issues and trust their developers just as good developers learn not to second guess their PMs.

>Have you even consider entry that PM can react to reasons why something take long

Uh, was that English?

>On your last point - given that developers with bad communication skills ask badly phrased questions or don't ask anything at all (just generically complain about bad analysis and insult pm - true story), yep it matters.

As I said before I've worked with several developers who rarely ask questions and just do the work (and do it well). All stellar developers and highly underrated.

>You jumped from "bad social skills" to "average" there.

We were always arguing about whether it was a priority for developers to have especially good (or even above average) soft skills, not whether it was ok to work with developers with cripplingly bad communication problems.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#85

Post by crdoconnor »

Clubber wrote: post #64
crdoconnor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And the reason that "the code is self-documenting" is a bad smell is because in 3 months even the 'rock star' who wrote it won't remember without appropriate help That simply means you're working with poor developers.

So you've never written code and come back to it 6 months later said said to yourself, "why did I do this?"

Many years ago yes, but not recently.

If you're a supposed "rock star" senior developer doing this it means you're just a bad developer. If you're a junior doing it just means you have some maturing to do.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#86

Post by darkerside »

wolco wrote: post #71
darkerside wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Machine code is for the computer. Human readable high-level languages were designed specifically for people.

Different newspapers write to different education levels. In your local paper you may find writing that a grade 8 student could understand. In your industry specific journal the writing may be at a grade 12 level. Not all code should or can be human readable by all.

Right, and some people will work in C, while others will work in Python. That doesn't quite line up with a "grade level", but I agree that different writing styles (or languages) suit different purposes best.

But I assure you, our computers would "think" that we are all idiots for using just about any high level language feature. We write things in loops (computer unrolls it), we give variables readable names so we can think about them (computer assigns it a memory address instead), and we build meaningful abstractions (computer sighs and turns it into meaningless 1s and 0s). So literally all high level languages are written for us feeble-minded HUMANS! Not for computers.

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