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I agree. Funny story with the code review, we had that. But several devs kept submitting broken/bad code, so they could tell their manager "oh, I'm waiting on a

I agree. Funny story with the code review, we had that. But several devs kept submitting broken/bad code, so they could tell their manager "oh, I'm waiting on a code review". The loss of productivity due to other devs trying to do constructive code reviews was staggering. One guy was asked to leave a project after he submitted 17 updates to the same commit, and all of them failed basic (and luckily automated) linting. Another contractor titled all his commit messages a single word: "update". I've even worked on a project where the build system was "maintained" by contractors - talk about a conflict of interest. You can imagine how transparent it was.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago
In the bad/broken code it again sounds like poor management - instituting the 'bums in seat' checklist of was present for a code review, versus the qualitative check of 'had done work that was worth reviewing'.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Sure, but any metric or process put in place is vulnerable to be gamed. In some way, I respect individuals who do this. Just don't bother my team. But managers aren't intrinsically bad people, they just have different motivations. And they have their own problems caused by politics. Ideally devs would have tools to combat this problem directly. But life isn't always fair.
ptero 10y ago
Of course there are developers who bring problems to projects. However, many of the problems are organizational: I have seen some projects place sizeable incentives on any bug fixes (e.g., highly value number of such submissions / week), which encourages people to do quick fixes for simple things, not important ones and does not penalize for poor performing software and convoluted code. If one finds itself in this environment, IMO it is best to run away. I wonder why such organizational behavior is very difficult to change -- I have seen, twice, smart people brought in to clean up a project stuck in this state. They were given freedom to run it the way they saw fit (upper management knew the project is failing) and both times they failed to change it.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  > I wonder why such organizational behavior is very difficult to change -- I have seen, twice, smart people brought in to clean up a project stuck in this state. They were given freedom to run it the way they saw fit (upper management knew the project is failing) and both times they failed to change it. It's a good question. I think it's often a hard sell, that the change, while more work in the short run is less effort in the long run. Why should I care? I'm still getting paid the same. Of course, that's a facile argument and easy to refute: professional development. In my experience organisational behaviour has a root cause. You have to find that and understand it to change it, you can't just change the organisational behaviour but leave the root cause. To an outsider, the root cause probably isn't obvious. Heck, sometimes by the time you understand it yourself, you've been there so long you might as well move on. But often, it's also the devs who refuse to get political. Who understands the system better, and why should somebody else fix it? But then the obvious excuses happen. "Too busy", "Not my problem", "Nothing I can do". Devs start leaving the project or the company. Now, it's never going to get changed. Apathy is the worst symptom.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

In the bad/broken code it again sounds like poor management - instituting the 'bums in seat' checklist of was present for a code review, versus the qualitative check of 'had done work that was worth reviewing'.

guitarbill 10y ago
Sure, but any metric or process put in place is vulnerable to be gamed. In some way, I respect individuals who do this. Just don't bother my team. But managers aren't intrinsically bad people, they just have different motivations. And they have their own problems caused by politics. Ideally devs would have tools to combat this problem directly. But life isn't always fair.

ptero 10y ago

Of course there are developers who bring problems to projects. However, many of the problems are organizational: I have seen some projects place sizeable incentives on any bug fixes (e.g., highly value number of such submissions / week), which encourages people to do quick fixes for simple things, not important ones and does not penalize for poor performing software and convoluted code. If one finds itself in this environment, IMO it is best to run away. I wonder why such organizational behavior is very difficult to change -- I have seen, twice, smart people brought in to clean up a project stuck in this state. They were given freedom to run it the way they saw fit (upper management knew the project is failing) and both times they failed to change it.

guitarbill 10y ago
> I wonder why such organizational behavior is very difficult to change -- I have seen, twice, smart people brought in to clean up a project stuck in this state. They were given freedom to run it the way they saw fit (upper management knew the project is failing) and both times they failed to change it. It's a good question. I think it's often a hard sell, that the change, while more work in the short run is less effort in the long run. Why should I care? I'm still getting paid the same. Of course, that's a facile argument and easy to refute: professional development. In my experience organisational behaviour has a root cause. You have to find that and understand it to change it, you can't just change the organisational behaviour but leave the root cause. To an outsider, the root cause probably isn't obvious. Heck, sometimes by the time you understand it yourself, you've been there so long you might as well move on. But often, it's also the devs who refuse to get political. Who understands the system better, and why should somebody else fix it? But then the obvious excuses happen. "Too busy", "Not my problem", "Nothing I can do". Devs start leaving the project or the company. Now, it's never going to get changed. Apathy is the worst symptom.