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Agreed. There is a narrative programmers tell when complaining online. It goes like > If only they would just leave me alone! I would sit in silence for 4 h
by corysama 11y ago
Agreed. There is a narrative programmers tell when complaining online. It goes like
> If only they would just leave me alone! I would sit in silence for 4 hours pondering the depths of the system at hand. Then I would spend 30 minutes invoking VIM macros at 240 actions/minute (that's why I spent 12 years integrating VIM into my lower cortex, after all). Then I would spend 5 minutes admiring the perfection of my creation before retiring to the pub. Tomorrow, everyone will find everything just works so much better than yesterday and they won't even know how or why. I'll just lean back and say "You're Welcome."
But, the reality is that you don't work in a vacuum; you don't know the whole situation; your proposed solution probably isn't as good as you'd like to think it is; other people are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because you never mentor them; you are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because other people aren't informing you about what you should be doing better; even when you are actively working on code, you spend less than 5% of your time actually typing code; if you are a senior engineer working on non-trivial systems, you probably spend more time sorting out how other people's code works than your own.
These realities don't fit the http://hackertyper.net/ http://hackertyper.net/ narrative. They're embarrassing and require inter-personal effort to resolve. But, brushing them off is making you a whole lot less productive than you should be.
- danielbryantuk 11y agoWow! I couldn't have said it better myself. Having worked across a variety of codebases and teams over the last 10+ years, it has become obvious to me that delivering software is an inherently social activity (at least the delivery of valuable software) IMHO, the reason we've seen the rise of XP, Behaviour-driven Design (BDD) and DevOps is that each part of the software delivery community is gradually coming to this conclusion within their own realm Mobbing for me just makes sense on so many level, especially from the point of view of adding 'expertise' to a problem/solution: Not sure on how to integrate the latest language feature into your code - bring someone with experience into the mob... Not sure how this feature could be tested - bring a QA/tester into the mob... Not sure of the infrastructure requirements of this new database - bring an operator into the mob...
- msie 11y agoPeople have been doing this for years, they've just not put a name to it.
- danielbryantuk 11y agoIn my experience working as a consultant across multiple organisations, not enough people have been doing this. As for a putting a name on it - a name can help spread the idea (ubiquitous language and all that), but it can lead to abuse and cargo-culting. I believe a label is often helpful during the 'innovation' and 'early adoption' diffusion of innovation phase, and this is firmly where mobbing is at the moment
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- msie 11y agoThanks for telling us what we already know about software development.
- corysama 11y agoIt's what we all already know, but it's not what we say to ourselves or to each other. Instead, we say things like > I like programming alone godammit! Will programming alone be relegated to hobby projects while I head to the meeting room for all my job-related programming duties? Bah humbug!!! So, in the middle of a lot of "Bah humbug!!!", it's good to have a reminder that maybe this awkward interpersonal stuff is important to, you know, actually getting real shit done.