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This satire is more sad than funny, because it's true. A manager's job isn't to understand good code, it's to understand business and to know how to effectively

This satire is more sad than funny, because it's true. A manager's job isn't to understand good code, it's to understand business and to know how to effectively get rid of road-blocks for programmers on the team. But how can they make decisions about how to make progress easier/smoother for every programmer, if they don't understand programming? It's kind of like when my kids are arguing without being able to solve it on their own, and I hear it from my office, and have to go over there to potentially solve the problem for them. What if they're arguing over a dispute over Pokeyman cards? I don't know anything about Pokeyman, and I can't learn well enough to give helpful advice or make firm rules on the spot. It seems like the best solution in both cases is to trust the person who's most "senior", either the senior developer or the oldest kid or whoever, to make a judgment call to know what to do here. Probably the other programmer should be brought up to speed on how that code works so when they encounter it next time, it's not confusing. Is that always practical or even possible? Probably not in a large corporate setting. But in smaller companies, I'm confident it probably always is. Of course, so long as the code isn't intentionally clever. As long as it's at least trying to be clear what it does, that should be good enough. But intentionally clever code should almost always be rewritten, because it's usually so clever that even the author can't understand what it does in 6 months' time.

zaphar 11y ago
There is an even better approach than trusting the most senior that will have a longer term payoff. The dispute is usually caused by a lack of people skills in one or both of the parties. If you can instead take this as an opportunity not to resolve a pokemon dispute but instead to teach dispute resolution skills to both then you don't need to know enough pokemon to resolve it. And the next time a dispute comes up around something you don't have enough information to be authoritative about the involved parties might be able to resolve it themselves.

zaphar 11y ago

There is an even better approach than trusting the most senior that will have a longer term payoff. The dispute is usually caused by a lack of people skills in one or both of the parties. If you can instead take this as an opportunity not to resolve a pokemon dispute but instead to teach dispute resolution skills to both then you don't need to know enough pokemon to resolve it. And the next time a dispute comes up around something you don't have enough information to be authoritative about the involved parties might be able to resolve it themselves.