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>there are parts of the code we can't touch because "he said it had to be this way". You know what? That just means you haven't shrugged his influence off. He'

by iSnow 10y ago

>there are parts of the code we can't touch because "he said it had to be this way". You know what? That just means you haven't shrugged his influence off. He's still casting that long shadow. When our local genius left, I felt lost but eventually stepped up, went through his code line by line documenting it, wrote enough tests so that I could be sure that I wouldn't introduce bugs while rewriting his code to make it readable for me. I learned quite a bit from that.

jdbernard 10y ago
Seconded. If this guy really wrote good stuff then this is a great learning opportunity. If you have some way to contact him even moreso. He may not be the type of person who can easily summarize or teach someone new to the codebase, but I bet if you read through it, got to know the problem and had specific questions about details of his approach, he would be more than able to discuss it with you. Often this kind of personality enjoys sharing their thoughts, they just don't enjoy spending lots of time getting someone up to speed from ground zero. But putting in the hours to grok the code might put you in a good position to have productive conversations.
somethingsimple 10y ago
I personally shrug it off, but I'm one of the newest guys in the team so I don't have a lot of clout to push for changes yet. Everyone else though seems to be caught into some sort of mysticism around the genius guy. Even our architect and our manager have this attitude of "we can't change this; it might look strange and we don't know why it's there, but he said that was how it had to be." It's very upsetting.
- iSnow 10y ago
  Good for you. I didn't want to pick on you or your colleges so much, I just think your local "genius" has weaknesses like everybody, but in reality your company is at fault. They should not mystify him, they should have made sure he shares knowledge with others and brings other up to speed. And as he is gone, they should make sure the code is refactored to suit the documentation level and code style the remaining devs are used to.

by iSnow 10y ago

jdbernard 10y ago

Seconded. If this guy really wrote good stuff then this is a great learning opportunity. If you have some way to contact him even moreso. He may not be the type of person who can easily summarize or teach someone new to the codebase, but I bet if you read through it, got to know the problem and had specific questions about details of his approach, he would be more than able to discuss it with you. Often this kind of personality enjoys sharing their thoughts, they just don't enjoy spending lots of time getting someone up to speed from ground zero. But putting in the hours to grok the code might put you in a good position to have productive conversations.

somethingsimple 10y ago

I personally shrug it off, but I'm one of the newest guys in the team so I don't have a lot of clout to push for changes yet. Everyone else though seems to be caught into some sort of mysticism around the genius guy. Even our architect and our manager have this attitude of "we can't change this; it might look strange and we don't know why it's there, but he said that was how it had to be." It's very upsetting.

iSnow 10y ago
Good for you. I didn't want to pick on you or your colleges so much, I just think your local "genius" has weaknesses like everybody, but in reality your company is at fault. They should not mystify him, they should have made sure he shares knowledge with others and brings other up to speed. And as he is gone, they should make sure the code is refactored to suit the documentation level and code style the remaining devs are used to.