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Your rationale-fu is strong! Look, by whatever accident of history, programmers are currently in demand. If your shop is suicidal/trigger-happy on firing thei

Your rationale-fu is strong! Look, by whatever accident of history, programmers are currently in demand. If your shop is suicidal/trigger-happy on firing their valuable programmers, then just leave that place before that happens and find happier digs. Job #1 for any professional programmer should be to sleep well at night and not work overtime. Stop making excuses for sloppy, rushed programming. Use your power to enforce good practices. Ah, but you say, "all that is relative, no one agrees on what the practices should be." More rationalizing; no more weak excuses! Every team can write unambiguous house rules that form the social contract over what definitions and expectations are regarding ready-ness, quality, done-ness, etc. Until the whole rest of the enterprise is behind you and aligned with you, all that matters is your team. A right attitude is key. You, the programmer: do the simplest thing possible and use the scientific method when writing code through rigorous testing. Meaningful, working tests are proof. After your team learns to hustle, then you have power to hold your product owner's feet to the fire! Question every bit of the requirements they set. Your designs should sell the work, embody those requirements, and draw out all the questions you have to the business - when you do a great job, they will ask and then answer all your questions and more for you. Sloppy, imprecise, crooked requirements must burn and be tested in the crucible of your design. You have the power to talk and argue and you have the power to say 'no'. Reject any slow or unproductive tools, libraries, practices. Put tremendous, outsized, decadent effort into automating the hell out of everything mundane or annoying in your sphere. Always protect your brand/product/team: all vanity or pet tools/patterns/languages/CQRS-ES must eventually be jettisoned out the airlock whenever team productivity is being impacted.

fogetti 9y ago
Such big words. In other words: non-sense. I worked in 6 different companies in 4 different countries across 3 different continents during my 10 years in IT. And no-one gives a shit about delivering bug-free code or good practices. There is such a thing called peer-pressure, probably you have never heard about it, it works like this: while you are fiddling with your scientific method to test everything properly, the guy sitting right next to you will get the same feature done when by going home and putting in a lot of overtime to make it look like he was working extremely fast and he pulled it off in matter of days and much faster than you. He will also give a shiny presentation and show off his working demo application while you are still writing tests in your scientific method. So after a few days your manager comes over to your desk and asks the guy sitting next to you if he could do the same thing, but now in a much more important project, where the deadline is super important. "Of course" - he replies, and he gets into a very interesting project and gets appraisals both verbally and also on his linked-in profile. He also gets a salary raise, since he is such a reliable guy who outperforms everyone. While you are still writing tests and wondering why nobody cares about your scientific method. I hope it's clearer now.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  Everything you described can be summarized pretty briefly: toxic work atmosphere. Look, I get it -- I was working in such organizations in the past. There are quite a few of lazy bums in there but they specialized in a few important aspects: (1) take credit for somebody else's work, (2) always have a pre-baked excuse or shifting the responsibility to somebody else if something in their job is not okay, and (3) have more years in there than you. There's a lot of internal politics and intrigue in these places. If you try to beat this system, eventually you'll become a part of the problem -- you'll spend most of your time making sure nobody takes credit for your work, that you're blame-free etc. There is no point. What you described does exist out there, yes. But I can bet my balls that the programmers I work with are times better than the parasites you describe. Plus, don't forget burnout. That guy you described can only maintain that rhythm for no more than 2 years, 3-4 if he's a real masochist. But it eventually comes to an end. The solutions these toxic places opt for are always short-term (clarification: that works pretty well for many of them by the way; they are perfectly aware of what are they doing and they just replace the burned out yongsters with fresh youngsters, and the cycle resets).
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  6 companies, 4 countries over 10 years? Are you a consultant? Otherwise, that's a LOT of job-hopping. So, I was a consultant for a "systems integrator" for 14 years. I did enterprise Java, web apps, and backend legacy integration work. If you are anything like me, then you know of course no one in your organization (or the client's organization) cares about quality! You guys are hired guns, the "tiger team". You fake it till you make it. You move around, you're like a bedouin trader, you're a nomad. Your comments about the coworker putting in OT to showoff and get ahead are just you wallowing in a bit of loathing. Never ever compare yourself with anyone else - we're all on our own tracks with our own tragedies and triumphs. If the guy wanted to bust his ass to make himself feel good, what do you care? God bless that dummy. Anyhow, I think I can help with the loathing by getting a little philosophical with you. Two questions: 1. Are there bits of code or projects you can recall you've written over the last decade that you're really proud of? (Like, you can tell war stories about working on that code and you love those stories?) 2. Is ANY of the code you wrote going to be around in 5 or 3 or even 2 years from now? The first question is to remind you of your craft, that it's really cool to make stuff work. The second question is to remind you that almost nothing you've done is built to last and is ultimately not going to leave any mark. Now, don't despair. You can always take joy from your craft: let fly your creations to work in the world and do their little jobs and then move on to the next thing. Reading your words, I can see that you're not taking much joy from the work right now. You don't have quality to hold up and you don't have good team dynamics where other people have your back. In consulting, code quality will never be a priority nor of interest to anyone, especially in smaller firms. And, it'll be tough to build strong teams because you move around so much. You should really settle down in a city and get a regular salary job. You won't take much of a pay cut once you factor in all the benefits. And there are plenty of big, established companies that practice TDD and have real Agile practices. Just search around and look at Fortune 1000 companies - the software teams working for those companies will signal quality to you through their blogs and open source offerings on Github. As I said before, your #1 goal should be to sleep well at night and not work overtime. That means not being afraid of PagerDuty, not being afraid of deploying code at the last minute on a Friday before leaving for the weekend, not being afraid to relentlessly refactor the code to improve it, not feeling dirty about your code because you're not hacking anymore. When you're not afraid, you can have a team where members have each others' backs instead of backstabbing too. That goal of sleeping good at night is totally possible, I'm living it right now. You need a new mindset. You need to improve your practices and start to claim your power as the developer. Read some code quality books, write some open source and teach yourself how to do TDD (I prefer "London" style TDD.) Listen to some of Uncle Bob's videos on YouTube or Safari Books online if you want to get into the groove. He's a goofball and a codger, but he's on the right track more than he is on the wrong track. And, buck up dude ... I hope it's clearer now. :)

fogetti 9y ago

Such big words. In other words: non-sense. I worked in 6 different companies in 4 different countries across 3 different continents during my 10 years in IT. And no-one gives a shit about delivering bug-free code or good practices. There is such a thing called peer-pressure, probably you have never heard about it, it works like this: while you are fiddling with your scientific method to test everything properly, the guy sitting right next to you will get the same feature done when by going home and putting in a lot of overtime to make it look like he was working extremely fast and he pulled it off in matter of days and much faster than you. He will also give a shiny presentation and show off his working demo application while you are still writing tests in your scientific method. So after a few days your manager comes over to your desk and asks the guy sitting next to you if he could do the same thing, but now in a much more important project, where the deadline is super important. "Of course" - he replies, and he gets into a very interesting project and gets appraisals both verbally and also on his linked-in profile. He also gets a salary raise, since he is such a reliable guy who outperforms everyone. While you are still writing tests and wondering why nobody cares about your scientific method. I hope it's clearer now.

pdimitar 9y ago
Everything you described can be summarized pretty briefly: toxic work atmosphere. Look, I get it -- I was working in such organizations in the past. There are quite a few of lazy bums in there but they specialized in a few important aspects: (1) take credit for somebody else's work, (2) always have a pre-baked excuse or shifting the responsibility to somebody else if something in their job is not okay, and (3) have more years in there than you. There's a lot of internal politics and intrigue in these places. If you try to beat this system, eventually you'll become a part of the problem -- you'll spend most of your time making sure nobody takes credit for your work, that you're blame-free etc. There is no point. What you described does exist out there, yes. But I can bet my balls that the programmers I work with are times better than the parasites you describe. Plus, don't forget burnout. That guy you described can only maintain that rhythm for no more than 2 years, 3-4 if he's a real masochist. But it eventually comes to an end. The solutions these toxic places opt for are always short-term (clarification: that works pretty well for many of them by the way; they are perfectly aware of what are they doing and they just replace the burned out yongsters with fresh youngsters, and the cycle resets).
EdSharkey 9y ago
6 companies, 4 countries over 10 years? Are you a consultant? Otherwise, that's a LOT of job-hopping. So, I was a consultant for a "systems integrator" for 14 years. I did enterprise Java, web apps, and backend legacy integration work. If you are anything like me, then you know of course no one in your organization (or the client's organization) cares about quality! You guys are hired guns, the "tiger team". You fake it till you make it. You move around, you're like a bedouin trader, you're a nomad. Your comments about the coworker putting in OT to showoff and get ahead are just you wallowing in a bit of loathing. Never ever compare yourself with anyone else - we're all on our own tracks with our own tragedies and triumphs. If the guy wanted to bust his ass to make himself feel good, what do you care? God bless that dummy. Anyhow, I think I can help with the loathing by getting a little philosophical with you. Two questions: 1. Are there bits of code or projects you can recall you've written over the last decade that you're really proud of? (Like, you can tell war stories about working on that code and you love those stories?) 2. Is ANY of the code you wrote going to be around in 5 or 3 or even 2 years from now? The first question is to remind you of your craft, that it's really cool to make stuff work. The second question is to remind you that almost nothing you've done is built to last and is ultimately not going to leave any mark. Now, don't despair. You can always take joy from your craft: let fly your creations to work in the world and do their little jobs and then move on to the next thing. Reading your words, I can see that you're not taking much joy from the work right now. You don't have quality to hold up and you don't have good team dynamics where other people have your back. In consulting, code quality will never be a priority nor of interest to anyone, especially in smaller firms. And, it'll be tough to build strong teams because you move around so much. You should really settle down in a city and get a regular salary job. You won't take much of a pay cut once you factor in all the benefits. And there are plenty of big, established companies that practice TDD and have real Agile practices. Just search around and look at Fortune 1000 companies - the software teams working for those companies will signal quality to you through their blogs and open source offerings on Github. As I said before, your #1 goal should be to sleep well at night and not work overtime. That means not being afraid of PagerDuty, not being afraid of deploying code at the last minute on a Friday before leaving for the weekend, not being afraid to relentlessly refactor the code to improve it, not feeling dirty about your code because you're not hacking anymore. When you're not afraid, you can have a team where members have each others' backs instead of backstabbing too. That goal of sleeping good at night is totally possible, I'm living it right now. You need a new mindset. You need to improve your practices and start to claim your power as the developer. Read some code quality books, write some open source and teach yourself how to do TDD (I prefer "London" style TDD.) Listen to some of Uncle Bob's videos on YouTube or Safari Books online if you want to get into the groove. He's a goofball and a codger, but he's on the right track more than he is on the wrong track. And, buck up dude ... I hope it's clearer now. :)