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Don’t point out something wrong immediately

blog.the-pans.com

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Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#81

Post by chrisweekly »

cottager2 wrote: post #59
hinkley wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we never got the time to fix it The older I get the more convinced I become that this is Learned Helplessness. "We didn't have time." is essentially the same dodge as "C'est le guerre" was in France. "We don't have time" is a conversation killer. "We are working on that bit by bit" is essentially the same statement once you've subtracted the helplessness. Nobody is ever gonna schedule time for you to have integrity…

The goal of writing software is rarely to produce a piece of well-engineered software. More commonly, the goal is to produce a product in a given time frame using the team of engineers available, which may be of variable quality. If you’re trying to make the software perfect, you’re likely doing something very wrong.

I agree that striving for (let alone expecting) perfection is fraught. But a business's goals in commissioning software development are related to but distinct from a developer's goals in delivering it. If you write software for a living in the 21st century, and you don't find a way to incorporate constant learning and improvement, and strive to refine and master your craft, then you're definitely doing it wrong.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#82

Post by eatonphil »

donatj wrote: post #40

This has been the hardest thing for me as I become more and more … old. I want to be like "this is wrong" "do it this way" etc. For a while there before I realized I was burning bridges, I was… for lack of better phrasing actively an asshole. There's value in letting the juniors flounder a bit. I had a conversation with my manager about this just a couple weeks ago. One of our junior developers was having trouble get…

Lucky for you both to have a good manager!

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#83

Post by chrisweekly »

hinkley wrote: post #62
cottager2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of writing software is rarely to produce a piece of well-engineered software. More commonly, the goal is to produce a product in a given time frame using the team of engineers available, which may be of variable quality. If you’re trying to make the software perfect, you’re likely doing something very wrong.

Businesses are in business to stay in business. Frequently nobody notices how much decline in capability the team is struggling with because 1) the change comes slowly, and 2) people are getting 'better' at taking calculated risks that keep the tempo up, masking the real situation until the company hits a brick wall and all estimates go from 3 weeks to 3 months overnight. As a customer these sorts of changes in behav…

Well said. (Bummed to find no profile info like a twitter handle or blog; if you've got one you're willing to share, please LMK.)

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#85

Post by tbrownaw »

cmckn wrote: post #66
vmception wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other side of this is how nearly every engineer is going to trash talk the prior coders, when they inherit a codebase. So I already know to ignore it.

> trash talk the prior coders This is one of the things that make the software life worth living! It's even better when you realize that the prior coder was, in fact, your own damn self.

> It's even better when you realize that the prior coder was, in fact, your own damn self.

That's really about the only time you can actually be sure that the prior coder deserves to be trash talked.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#87

Post by _9omd »

Yes, please don't be that guy. I was a lead at the last startup I was at, and we hired a guy who loved to point out everything we were doing "wrong". Literally weeks into the job and he's already writing up huge docs about everything we need to improve, with having almost no context for why we made certain decisions. The majority of things he assumed to know better on we also knew better about, but there simply wasn't enough time and man power to do things in the "right" way. He also pointed out some things that we were unaware of, but he had already tarnished his reputation by being so abrasive about the critique while putting so little time into understanding.

Now the twist in this story, is that through this interaction, I reflected on a past job and realized that I had been that guy once! That sure was a moment of personal cringe. It's cemented into my brain how important it is to ask questions to fully understand the context decisions are made in before chiming in to say how wrong they are.

Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately

#89

Post by Melatonic »

Instead of pointing out why I think something is wrong I just starting asking questions dancing around the subject. A lot of times it comes down to just getting to "What problem are we trying to solve here?"

Many times the original person might have made some small assumption and then that filters down and causes the current situation to be "wrong". Or maybe I am making the wrong assumption and I simply need to understand what the problem is, at its simplest, that we are all working together to find a solution for.

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