15 ms·

Why your programmers just want to code

165 points by nreece 9y ago

chrisco255 9y ago
This is so on point: "Culture isn’t the slogan on your wall, or how you describe your mission during an interview. Culture is the way people actually act, and what they actually care about." PMs and Dev Managers, your engineers are smart, dynamic individuals. If you engage them and include them in important conversations and actively solicit their feedback while providing context and customer feedback, you will get innovative and creative ideas, you will get an energized work force, and everybody will be happier for it. Don't treat engineers like an assembly line: software is a dynamic machine and it requires everyone's best work to evolve in the right way.
- minicoolva 9y ago
  Yes, you are right
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  While you're not wrong about culture is action, here's studies show collecting and disseminating that culture (aka writing it on the wall - knowledge management in the literature) leads to measurable competitive advantage. Sorry these are from journals https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-77953027877&doi=10.1016%2fj.jbusres.2009.06.005&origin=inward&txGid=00233ff082dcf44d5150557779b268f7 https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-7795302... https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-80055059599&doi=10.1108%2f02580541111177548&origin=inward&txGid=d8b8914e2770bda839307aab61e242fd https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-8005505...
w_t_payne 9y ago
The programmer in this story has realised this fundamental truth: The spoken word is ephemeral and easily forgot. The design of the product that pays the bills is not so easily undone. What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. When it comes to what actually gets implemented — all of the power is in the hands of the programmer who gets there first. After all — once the die has been cast and the direction set, who is going to undo the work and start again? In this, the programmer is the decider. Programmers have an immense amount of power, and there is no reason whatsoever why he shouldn’t simply ignore the pointless social preening and get on and make the product that he wants to. After all, the consequences of his decisions will ripple far and wide thorough the product and beyond and have a heft; a level of consequence and a permanence that no ‘soft’ skills specialist can match.
- locopati 9y ago
  Except that the programmer rarely has an idea of the big picture and the business problems that need solving and often sees the world through narrow lenses of 'problems I've solved before' or 'how things are done' or 'knowing what's going on'. All those 'soft' skills are figuring out what needs doing (even if it's often difficult to translate that into a product that can be developed).
- scandox 9y ago
  > What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. That just sounds like you've had very negative experiences in terms of meetings / company culture. I have lots of meetings where collaboratively we come up with much better approaches to problems, by sharing information and ensuring everybody is aware of other people's perspectives and domain expertise. Sometimes yes there is confusion and BS. But if we push through it, we usually come out doing better work - or in the ideal case LESS work!
  - w_t_payne 9y ago
    My comment illustrates the situation in a particularly dysfunctional and corrosive organisation. Whilst none of us want to work in a place like this, and none of us enjoy the experience if and when we are forced to do so; we cannot pretend that workplaces like this do not exist. Sadly, dysfunction is probably more prevalent than we would like to admit. Fortunately, we are blessed to live in a world with endless variety; a world in which workplaces with a much healthier and productive culture also exist; places which genuinely foster cooperation and loyalty and encourage and support their employees to contribute and to feel positively about their contribution.
- partycoder 9y ago
  A healthy team is a team with high social capital: a team that seeks the common good, where people clean up after themselves and volunteer to help others. Everyone wants the best idea to prevail. All this while preserving critical thinking and trusting other people with the feedback that is necessary to improve. Their most important competitor is another company. An unhealthy team is a team with low social capital: a team that seeks individual gain and people force others to pick up after their technical debt. Everyone wants their own idea to prevail. All this while avoiding any form of uneasy conversation and withholding feedback. Their most important competitor is each other.
qznc 9y ago
I just realized that I turned into Jamie sometimes as well. At the beginning of a project, I worked without respect to boundaries. When a bug in another teams codebase held me back, I fixed it there. Over time I learned that this was neither appreciated nor welcome for some, so I stopped doing it. Unfortunately, this also a problem for me, because the bugs don't get fixed and block me. I invited a programmer from another team into my repo and we collaborated there. Then I was told not to do the work for another team (by the other team, ironically), so we forked. Now the repos have diverged and the users, who want to use both, suffer.
partycoder 9y ago
How would you feel if: - you were a chef. you went to culinary school and know about cooking and best practices. - you are asked to forget everything you learned in school and flip burgers with overly reused oil and unwashed equipment. - you are told that there's no time to clean the kitchen, or wash your hands. just flip as many burgers as possible to maximize profit. - the ones that cook the most burgers are rewarded, treated well, promoted. as soon as cooks realize this, they start making half-cooked burgers that make people sick. - the customers get sick all the time from the lack of hygiene. you talk about it, and you are told to keep doing what you are doing, or that you don't understand what being a chef is, or what the business is. - in the end the only source of gratification is getting a paycheck, or doing something in your spare time. you are not cooking real food, just part of a machine that makes money for a self-serving company while ripping off the customer. This is what it feels to be an engineer in many companies.
- thiagooffm 9y ago
  you should write a post in medium with this content...
- wikibob 9y ago
  This is terrific. Agree with the other reply, this would make a great Medium post.
- PythonJay 9y ago
  I created an account to agree with you. That's a great way of putting it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- stuxnet79 9y ago
  Brilliant! Please turn this into a Medium post!!
- mratzloff 9y ago
  You always have a choice.
paulhilbert 9y ago
"It’s only natural, then, that your programmer is reduced to doing only what brings him success: coding." Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...
- ndh2 9y ago
  Oh, wow. Care to elaborate? I found the entire article so relatable that I even thought about registering on Medium to be able to clap.
  - paulhilbert 9y ago
    I spent most of my day coding. Except for some fresh air breaks and occasional discussions on how to collaborate I actually spend every second doing it. And I love it. The article suggests in its whole premise that this is wrong. For me and for the business. Yet it lacks any evidence on why I should want to do more than that - in fact I would even call it blindly dogmatic in that regard. But at least in my work context I think that my boss's job is to keep me from customers and design decisions as much as possible - since that is what I love and what yields the most productive use of my time. I wonder why my joiner friends aren't told that spending all day in their workshop creating beautiful wooden art is wrong and that they should instead derive more pleasure from interactions with their customers... Maybe in an ideal world someone who cries over every line of code since she/he would much rather make design decisions but is left out of the creativity loop just isn't a natural coder. Just like someone who hates working with wood maybe shouldn't. I am well aware that this is a position of extremes and blocks out the gray areas that are reality. But my work reality is just not what this "Hacker, Problem Solver, Calvinist, Geek" regards as the very premise of his manager lesson.
    - PeachPlum 9y ago
      Does it not bring you any pleasure for your users to find your work valuable ? We could all just sit at home and write code all day. but without users there is no point. The situation describe in the OP is a result of a poor management culture, which is why it's there.
Jach 9y ago
So there are two stages here... First is caring about the what, and getting no traction in determining that. It's left to the PMs. Second is caring about the how, trying to at least get ideas implemented on that front. But what's the stage after that? If you get no traction on making a better what, nor doing it with a better how? Will a company with a strong why, a sense of purpose, that is felt and understood by all the employees help ward off the troubles of obsessing over what and how?
- Terr_ 9y ago
  > But what's the stage after that? Unfortunately I feel like I can answer this (or at least suggest a direction) from current personal experience. When the engineers are not allowed to fix fundamental problems, the next stage is about defending themselves from blame that they feel is not rightfully theirs. Ex: _________ "Hi Bob, this problem appears to be due to corrupt data. Our 9-year old platform does not actually use foreign-keys or database transactions, and we haven't been able to get approval to replace it." "Alex, I haven't seen this feature before, it seems to be from the offshore contractors and their PM. Reproducing the error, it seems they introduced it about five months ago, so we'll have to check those records for mistakes." "Mary, I'm afraid our software isn't able to support names in those languages. I'm including a link to a memo I made three years ago that explains the limitations and suggests some ways we could fix it, if the business considers it a priority."
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    To be fair, not being able to attribute problems to their underlying cause is a fundamental problem. People strive for simple systems at least partly to seek property in their system.
Terr_ 9y ago
> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” Oh man, this one hits very close to home. I can say there exists at least one additional circle of hell, found after the engineer has abandoned all hope of influencing code-quality. The kind found after executives have hired outsourced teams to "help" add features with no code-review process or commit-hooks. Perhaps: "We aren't logging errors right."
crdoconnor 9y ago
>But, two years later, Jamie was “that guy”. You know, the one who wants to code without being bothered. >I should have noticed the signs. He didn’t speak up in retrospectives, he didn’t contribute process or product ideas like I expected, and his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. I suspect if you just gave Jamie free reign to spend most (not all, just most) of his time refactoring the code base and fixing up the dev tooling while other people worked on bugs and features then Jamie would be happier, the code base would be less buggy and the other developers would get their features done quicker. The fact that Jamie is quite grumpy about all of this suggests that the code quality and tooling at this company is poor and he isn't being allowed to fix the things that are causing him pain. And maybe he doesn't want to meet customers? Is it so bad if that task is left to somebody who likes doing it? >His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. >Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” This attitude absolutely floors me. You absolutely want a diversity of attitudes and skills on any team and that includes having some people who worry more about building the right thing and other people who worry more about building the thing right. Those are complementary attitudes that usually go with complementary skillsets.
- alain_gilbert 9y ago
  You said something that reach me so much: "tooling". I sometime feels like if you don't have good tools, it's almost impossible for the employees to be productive or motivated. I often see some people working in the most unproductive way possible (to my eyes) that it actually discourage me. I'm left wondering how they can even get anything done when spending so much time doing simple tasks.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Yeah, I sometimes joke that the average developer is a somebody who pushes their code with a series of repetitive git commands typed in unreliably, deploys unreliably with a repetitive set of shell commands, relies almost totally on a battery of bored, robotically clicking manual testers and believes that he is automating people out of a job. I think one of the most underrated (and almost totally ignored) parts of the mythical man month was the notion of the toolsmith being a dedicated member of a good software team who doesn't work on features.
m_fayer 9y ago
After you have a good decade of experience under your belt, most programming is... easy. Sure maybe not if you're working on self driving cars or game engines or kernel modules, but then the programming is only half the point anyway - the rest is math and science. But if you're not working on one of those but doing something more typical, and you're decently experienced and competent (and maybe also not compulsively chasing the bleeding edge), then programming is often just cranking out features, a steady drip of success. So of course the path of maximum pleasure is to crank out code. What's harder than coding? Smartly balancing the stakeholders. Maintaining the discipline, motivation, and knowhow required to maintain the engineering process - testing, documentation, CI, etc. Herding the cats that are a group of programmers, managing the egos, ensuring that a team stays aligned on style and architecture, that's the hard stuff.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The problem many programmers face, is that for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have. So of course, some find it easier just to code away without having to deal with other humans. Personally, I get bored to death on the projects where I happen to be a lone dev.
  - m_fayer 9y ago
    Past a certain point of career progression, soft skills are a necessity in most industries. I don't see why it should be different with software.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > ...for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have... Only because technical decision making is poorly structured in most organizations. Or it's clear but evaluation of decisions and decision-makers is poor. If it were: - get feedback from these N<3 people - here's how you do that - they are required to give clear decisions - within X days ...it wouldn't matter so much that Engineer McCodeface wasn't the best at attending happy hours, back-scratching, etc.
    - 9y ago
dazzer 9y ago
Hah this is pretty much me at my current joint... and the worst part is it just feels like there's nothing left after.
downvote_me 9y ago
There is a huge amount of insight on this post and I could not upvote this story enough. It is exactly the onboarding process and all the BS/political powerplay and non-productive rhetorics that pass that exact message to a programmer. Multiply this by ten if you happen to be a non-native developer in a mostly ethnic company where your language skills are below native. So -even though it is never clearly said in the open- the message gets to be 'you are just a "foreign" code monkey'.
ju-st 9y ago
I think managers begin to BS around and only caring about paychecks for similar reasons. It's not only the lowest level in companies (programmers, engineers...) who grow tired of non cooperating higher ups.
pipio21 9y ago
As someone who has been programmer and now hires lots of programmers, there are things in life you can't buy, like love, or in this case, respect. I learned motorola assembler, then intel's when I was a kid and have been programming all my life,studied engineering and made a software company from scratch. Programmers respect me in a way they do not respect an MBA, no matter the title or the money they have. In a company it is a big problem. You can't see it, it is invisible but man you could sense it, it is a very strong force.
AllegedAlec 9y ago
This hits a little too close to home for me. I cannot count the number of times per that one of the following situations has happened: - I go to our designers with an inconsistency, omission or even an outright contradiction in the design just to hear that this is how it was designed and that the client approved this design, so we should implement it precisely as the design says. - Development is slowed down/held back by technical debt and odd implementation choices. When I suggest we fix this, I get told that fixing what isn't broken doesn't earn us money, so I should work around it for now. - I have a suggestion for some process improvement (for example: developer post-mortems, including developers in the design review process), to get told that it's already been tried at some point in the past (usually back in the really early days of the company when there were less than 5 employees) and that it didn't work back then, which means that it will never work, no matter how much has changed since then.
- m_fayer 9y ago
  That's just a bad company you're working for, it absolutely does not have to be this bad.
- rovek 9y ago
  > including developers in the design review process I was banging this drum for 2 years at my previous employer. I was always told it's a great idea but the people who knew projects were coming down the line just never reached out to the tech team. We are all tech consumers, letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the possible.
  - AllegedAlec 9y ago
    > letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the possible. Pretty much this. We consistently get screwed over on our schedules because designers just throw a design over our way without asking us for any input along the way.
megaman22 9y ago
It's not just programming; anything where your thoughts and concerns are automatically dismissed and shoved aside becomes incredibly demoralizing. Eventually you either give up completely, or you settle into the tiny corner where you're allowed to have opinions and act on them.
petagonoral 9y ago
Yet another person who I feel I would dislike working with. Maybe, at the start of each post where people ramble in such a binary fashion, they could post a snippet of why they think they can comment with authority on whatever the article content is about. This guys MO ties in nicely with most "well meaning" but utterly clueless folk I've seen when it comes to software development. Even more so when I see his site (https://marcusblankenship.com https://marcusblankenship.com) has: > Let me teach you how to create a high-performing software team
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I need the money. So don't be surprised that I'll be doing my job as effectively as possible - which involves lots of lone coding, unless your internal process is completely bonkers - but I ain't gonna drink the kool-aid. Want someone with a more "professional" attitude? Filter for that during the interview. And that "changing the world" thing? That's just bullshit, and you're not fooling anyone past their teenage years with that. You're not SpaceX. You're not changing shit. Chances are, you're just trying to make money selling the usual butt CRUD everyone else is selling too. If you hire smart people, don't be surprised they know it's bullshit. Programmers want to code because they're programmers. Chefs want to cook because they're chefs. That's what they do. This article only shows hiring laziness, coupled with usual complaining that the company isn't getting more than it asked for. -- EDIT: Ok, this article doesn't only show hiring laziness. The point about how vulnerable enthusiastic people are in the initial period is spot-on and I agree with it. I wrote the above comment because I believe that the article as a whole exemplifies additional lack of understanding of the perspective of programmers, which can lead to extra post-interview disappointment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  It would be strange for a programmer as an employee to care about the business or the product, given that he has to work for a living and has no stake in any of it. It seems to be a common misunderstanding, unicorn employees that want to care about the business don't actually exist, but a lot are willing to lie about it of course.
  - hobs 9y ago
    How do you make something better if you dont give a shit? It's not only not strange, its pretty much a job requirement to recognize your job is the stake in the business. Every single programming job I have had has required me to care enough about the product and the business to understand, interpret, and implement things that the business wanted but couldnt fully articulate. That being said, if the business wants you to be both the business and the programmer, they have a broken system and are failing to manage properly
jdowner 9y ago
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude." "You must be an engineer," says the balloonist. "I am," replies the man. "How did you know?" "Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. "The man below says, "You must be a manager." "I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?" "Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault." -- This is the sentiment that I see in the article. It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.
- danzig13 9y ago
  If the manager / CEO / businessy business person is holistically concerned with the health of the business and the software engineer is only concerned with their domain of expertise, they are relatively childish compared to that person that is expected to know enough about everything and sincerely takes it on.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    And that person is either ignored or swamped in "the process". Or both.
reacweb 9y ago
"He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. An irritating “I told you so” sentiment plagued his comments and feedback." I recognise myself very much in this traits. When I work on a new project, I maintain a diary with a section todo and a section technical debt. It appears, there are always many items in technical debt. The mindset of people is very influenced by their role. A developer is mainly fixing bugs and creating architecture that should be less bug prone. Anticipating problems is our job and does not mean we are negative. We are happy when the technical debt is small. I think that this article shows that people have difficulties to listen to developers and do not grasp their mindset. I am quite happy my boss listen to me. In a previous job, I had a colleague who helped me a lot to get listened to. I think a developer needs to have good stretches of time undisturbed to get work done, but needs to spend time discussing with others to understand their needs and provide his insights. If nobody listen, the developer can only complain like in this article.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I agree. I imagine the beginning of the end is, the agile standup/sprint process. Instead of addressing the code as a whole, we're reduced to picking at one piece at a time in isolation. No development without a customer issue to justify it! Especially the new guy. And to come in after a couple of years of this, and find a code base that is a pile of individual pieces in a loose spaghetti wad, is so absolutely disillusioning. You want to fix it; you know what needs to be done; but you have to add this field to this structure so some UI element can report some crap that hardly anybody cares about instead.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 9y ago
    Just realized this is now me. "A pile of individual pieces in a loose spaghetti wad" exactly describes what I've been made responsible for. Each source file shows scars of sprints where some poor fool was given a story and told "just make it work" with no concern for any big picture.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
JeanMarcS 9y ago
3 years ago I crossed the ocean to join a team on a project that seemed great. I'm not 25 anymore so it was a big deal, moving my wife and kids (but it's on a Caribbean island, so they were not hard to convince). I was asked to join because of my background in mathematics, my vision on resolving problems, and my programming skills. Not bragging, I'm just a regular guy, but the person recruiting me was the co founder of my company, we know each other for 25 years. So he knows me well and know my skills. I was asked to join for bringing a new vision on some tricky points. Small team, one leader. Almost every time I proposed something new, it was dismissed, and sometimes with contempt. Of course it's something they worked on for several years, and they tried a lot of solutions before I joined, so some of my idea were surely already tested and all. But I ended up doing some UI on jquery (yeah, I know...) and became miserable as time passed. Because, you know, before even be sure that the core was working, they wanted a fancy interface... Ended bad. I finally quit after 18 months of doing the same stuff again and again, as the UI changed every time a new idea came up. My point is I totally understand the point of the article. I came with a bag full of ideas and happiness on working on that. I ended doing shitty stuff and feeling uninterested and bored about programming shit all day.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
azangru 9y ago
"Just want to code" as opposed to what? After reading the article, I am not sure I understand what he wants programmers to do.
- firepoet 9y ago
  I don't think the author wants programmers to "do" anything. Instead, they want managers to allow programmers to bring their whole selves to their jobs. That means not blockading their ideas from being implemented, regardless of what realm they belong in. If a programmer has a product idea, they should have a chance to prove it's a good one. If they have a process idea, it should be considered. And so on...
humanrebar 9y ago
> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” To be fair, part of an engineer's job is to give her opinion on when you're not building the right thing because you're building the right thing in the wrong way. Building something with 10-100X more cost, unacceptable bug rates, or a pivot-unfriendly design means losing money in many (most?) contexts.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  It can always be debugged in the next sprint! Just pick up another item from the board and keep coding; if we get behind we'll just hire some more college grads.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    "Will this feature be profitable if it requires X more engineers per Y users?" If the answer is yes, then I guess it's fine.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Until the code base becomes so intractable, such a dinosaur of brittle features and run-on code that nothing significant can be done without exhaustive debugging. Then no group is large enough to make good progress. Loose wads of code with random dependencies make the effort grow geometrically. No growth in team membership can keep up with that for long. The only solution is to tightly control dependencies, write good abstractions and keep to them religiously, etc. So many, many projects head off this particular cliff. They pretend to have life for a while, reducing the feature set in each drop to smaller and smaller items. Relabelling a bug fix a feature, and features overrun the sprint/release and get relabeled 'bugs' so you can keep developing through the test and release phases. So many of us recognize the syndrome. But so little gets done about it, especially in large companies.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
tetron 9y ago
Some of these responses speak to the difference between "programming" and "software engineering". If you want people to hack code without regard for what it is for, you get programmers. If you want a team that is fully engaged in building a product (which means the whole life cycle from requirements to deployment) you need software engineers. If you disempower developers from that kind of decision making, it doesn't matter what their title is.
thisisit 9y ago
Wow. This article really resonated with me. I was "Jamie" until 2 months ago. I choose my jobs very carefully. So when this company had a reputation of hiring the best, I was beyond excited. The interview process was great. I really liked interacting with the (future) manager. And....things went downhill in the very first month. In the first team meeting VP announced that the manager was moving on. All the while I could see it was not mutual agreement between the manager and VP. But, I thought that was not my problem. A meeting was set with the new manager and there it dawned to me that I was in huge trouble. The new guy wanted me to do a presentation in front of the VP and other C-level executives. "But I am not aware of the project requirements" I said. He summarily ignored my objections. On landing in front of the VP and C-level people I was criticised for not knowing the project requirements. While the old manager tried to help me, the new guy kept his mouth shut. Later the new manager offered me a half ass apology. That proved to be the last straw and I became the person who just wanted to code.
lbill 9y ago
TL;DR: I lived this situation on a shitty firm. It's depressing. But "good" firms do exist, don't lose hope! I lived this situation : I got hired as a developer and got involved into making the product better and improving our processes. But the firm was (and still is) utter shit. It was painful and I was unhappy. Some people there are still trying to do a good job and they have had several episodes of burn-out. Some other just lowered their standard and accept to get paid to poop some ugly code and apply useless processes (some might be happy, but most of them are dead inside). I just gave up on this nonsense and quit, and was lucky enough to find a much better place. My new firm (not that "new", it's been more than a year now) is not perfect and can definitely be improved... But motivation and commitment into improving things are actually welcome, and it works!
aviso5 9y ago
Programmers can't into graphic design - https://youtu.be/NM1UeFFCofY https://youtu.be/NM1UeFFCofY
- prsy 9y ago
  This is spam
dgreensp 9y ago
This article comes to entirely the wrong conclusion, and I am very encouraged at the number of commenters pointing it out. Engineers engineer. They are highly trained professionals who are doing their job when they are figuring out how to build something, improve something, or fix something, often with the goal of being able to develop new features quickly without an inordinate number of bugs. Your engineering team shouldn’t be running your business. Even if they have good ideas. And in practice, they will be overruled immediately, anyway, the moment someone with any real authority makes a roadmap or a key decision, because they are engineers. They aren’t answerable to the board. They haven’t studied the market and competitive landscape in depth. They can’t pivot the company. There’s something perverse and The Office-like about diagnosing Jamie as a problem “but it’s not his fault.” Engineer runs into boss’s office: “Sir, code quality is critically low. I suggest we begin paying down technical debt before it’s too late.” Boss, smiling to camera: “This is Jamie. When he started, he was a team player. He believed in the vision. He didn’t spend all day nit-picking about things like code quality. Look at him now! I don’t blame Jamie, though. I blame myself. If I had made Jamie feel like his big ideas and product insights were welcome here, early on, he wouldn’t have devolved into seeing himself as a mere code monkey.”

165 points by nreece 9y ago

This is so on point: "Culture isn’t the slogan on your wall, or how you describe your mission during an interview. Culture is the way people actually act, and what they actually care about." PMs and Dev Managers, your engineers are smart, dynamic individuals. If you engage them and include them in important conversations and actively solicit their feedback while providing context and customer feedback, you will get innovative and creative ideas, you will get an energized work force, and everybody will be happier for it. Don't treat engineers like an assembly line: software is a dynamic machine and it requires everyone's best work to evolve in the right way.

minicoolva 9y ago
Yes, you are right
PeachPlum 9y ago
While you're not wrong about culture is action, here's studies show collecting and disseminating that culture (aka writing it on the wall - knowledge management in the literature) leads to measurable competitive advantage. Sorry these are from journals https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-77953027877&doi=10.1016%2fj.jbusres.2009.06.005&origin=inward&txGid=00233ff082dcf44d5150557779b268f7 https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-7795302... https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-80055059599&doi=10.1108%2f02580541111177548&origin=inward&txGid=d8b8914e2770bda839307aab61e242fd https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-8005505...

w_t_payne 9y ago

The programmer in this story has realised this fundamental truth: The spoken word is ephemeral and easily forgot. The design of the product that pays the bills is not so easily undone. What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. When it comes to what actually gets implemented — all of the power is in the hands of the programmer who gets there first. After all — once the die has been cast and the direction set, who is going to undo the work and start again? In this, the programmer is the decider. Programmers have an immense amount of power, and there is no reason whatsoever why he shouldn’t simply ignore the pointless social preening and get on and make the product that he wants to. After all, the consequences of his decisions will ripple far and wide thorough the product and beyond and have a heft; a level of consequence and a permanence that no ‘soft’ skills specialist can match.

locopati 9y ago
Except that the programmer rarely has an idea of the big picture and the business problems that need solving and often sees the world through narrow lenses of 'problems I've solved before' or 'how things are done' or 'knowing what's going on'. All those 'soft' skills are figuring out what needs doing (even if it's often difficult to translate that into a product that can be developed).
scandox 9y ago
> What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world. That just sounds like you've had very negative experiences in terms of meetings / company culture. I have lots of meetings where collaboratively we come up with much better approaches to problems, by sharing information and ensuring everybody is aware of other people's perspectives and domain expertise. Sometimes yes there is confusion and BS. But if we push through it, we usually come out doing better work - or in the ideal case LESS work!
- w_t_payne 9y ago
  My comment illustrates the situation in a particularly dysfunctional and corrosive organisation. Whilst none of us want to work in a place like this, and none of us enjoy the experience if and when we are forced to do so; we cannot pretend that workplaces like this do not exist. Sadly, dysfunction is probably more prevalent than we would like to admit. Fortunately, we are blessed to live in a world with endless variety; a world in which workplaces with a much healthier and productive culture also exist; places which genuinely foster cooperation and loyalty and encourage and support their employees to contribute and to feel positively about their contribution.
partycoder 9y ago
A healthy team is a team with high social capital: a team that seeks the common good, where people clean up after themselves and volunteer to help others. Everyone wants the best idea to prevail. All this while preserving critical thinking and trusting other people with the feedback that is necessary to improve. Their most important competitor is another company. An unhealthy team is a team with low social capital: a team that seeks individual gain and people force others to pick up after their technical debt. Everyone wants their own idea to prevail. All this while avoiding any form of uneasy conversation and withholding feedback. Their most important competitor is each other.

qznc 9y ago

I just realized that I turned into Jamie sometimes as well. At the beginning of a project, I worked without respect to boundaries. When a bug in another teams codebase held me back, I fixed it there. Over time I learned that this was neither appreciated nor welcome for some, so I stopped doing it. Unfortunately, this also a problem for me, because the bugs don't get fixed and block me. I invited a programmer from another team into my repo and we collaborated there. Then I was told not to do the work for another team (by the other team, ironically), so we forked. Now the repos have diverged and the users, who want to use both, suffer.

partycoder 9y ago

How would you feel if: - you were a chef. you went to culinary school and know about cooking and best practices. - you are asked to forget everything you learned in school and flip burgers with overly reused oil and unwashed equipment. - you are told that there's no time to clean the kitchen, or wash your hands. just flip as many burgers as possible to maximize profit. - the ones that cook the most burgers are rewarded, treated well, promoted. as soon as cooks realize this, they start making half-cooked burgers that make people sick. - the customers get sick all the time from the lack of hygiene. you talk about it, and you are told to keep doing what you are doing, or that you don't understand what being a chef is, or what the business is. - in the end the only source of gratification is getting a paycheck, or doing something in your spare time. you are not cooking real food, just part of a machine that makes money for a self-serving company while ripping off the customer. This is what it feels to be an engineer in many companies.

thiagooffm 9y ago
you should write a post in medium with this content...
wikibob 9y ago
This is terrific. Agree with the other reply, this would make a great Medium post.
PythonJay 9y ago
I created an account to agree with you. That's a great way of putting it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stuxnet79 9y ago
Brilliant! Please turn this into a Medium post!!
mratzloff 9y ago
You always have a choice.

paulhilbert 9y ago

"It’s only natural, then, that your programmer is reduced to doing only what brings him success: coding." Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...

ndh2 9y ago
Oh, wow. Care to elaborate? I found the entire article so relatable that I even thought about registering on Medium to be able to clap.
- paulhilbert 9y ago
  I spent most of my day coding. Except for some fresh air breaks and occasional discussions on how to collaborate I actually spend every second doing it. And I love it. The article suggests in its whole premise that this is wrong. For me and for the business. Yet it lacks any evidence on why I should want to do more than that - in fact I would even call it blindly dogmatic in that regard. But at least in my work context I think that my boss's job is to keep me from customers and design decisions as much as possible - since that is what I love and what yields the most productive use of my time. I wonder why my joiner friends aren't told that spending all day in their workshop creating beautiful wooden art is wrong and that they should instead derive more pleasure from interactions with their customers... Maybe in an ideal world someone who cries over every line of code since she/he would much rather make design decisions but is left out of the creativity loop just isn't a natural coder. Just like someone who hates working with wood maybe shouldn't. I am well aware that this is a position of extremes and blocks out the gray areas that are reality. But my work reality is just not what this "Hacker, Problem Solver, Calvinist, Geek" regards as the very premise of his manager lesson.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    Does it not bring you any pleasure for your users to find your work valuable ? We could all just sit at home and write code all day. but without users there is no point. The situation describe in the OP is a result of a poor management culture, which is why it's there.

Jach 9y ago

So there are two stages here... First is caring about the what, and getting no traction in determining that. It's left to the PMs. Second is caring about the how, trying to at least get ideas implemented on that front. But what's the stage after that? If you get no traction on making a better what, nor doing it with a better how? Will a company with a strong why, a sense of purpose, that is felt and understood by all the employees help ward off the troubles of obsessing over what and how?

Terr_ 9y ago
> But what's the stage after that? Unfortunately I feel like I can answer this (or at least suggest a direction) from current personal experience. When the engineers are not allowed to fix fundamental problems, the next stage is about defending themselves from blame that they feel is not rightfully theirs. Ex: _________ "Hi Bob, this problem appears to be due to corrupt data. Our 9-year old platform does not actually use foreign-keys or database transactions, and we haven't been able to get approval to replace it." "Alex, I haven't seen this feature before, it seems to be from the offshore contractors and their PM. Reproducing the error, it seems they introduced it about five months ago, so we'll have to check those records for mistakes." "Mary, I'm afraid our software isn't able to support names in those languages. I'm including a link to a memo I made three years ago that explains the limitations and suggests some ways we could fix it, if the business considers it a priority."
- humanrebar 9y ago
  To be fair, not being able to attribute problems to their underlying cause is a fundamental problem. People strive for simple systems at least partly to seek property in their system.

Terr_ 9y ago

> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” Oh man, this one hits very close to home. I can say there exists at least one additional circle of hell, found after the engineer has abandoned all hope of influencing code-quality. The kind found after executives have hired outsourced teams to "help" add features with no code-review process or commit-hooks. Perhaps: "We aren't logging errors right."

crdoconnor 9y ago

>But, two years later, Jamie was “that guy”. You know, the one who wants to code without being bothered. >I should have noticed the signs. He didn’t speak up in retrospectives, he didn’t contribute process or product ideas like I expected, and his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. I suspect if you just gave Jamie free reign to spend most (not all, just most) of his time refactoring the code base and fixing up the dev tooling while other people worked on bugs and features then Jamie would be happier, the code base would be less buggy and the other developers would get their features done quicker. The fact that Jamie is quite grumpy about all of this suggests that the code quality and tooling at this company is poor and he isn't being allowed to fix the things that are causing him pain. And maybe he doesn't want to meet customers? Is it so bad if that task is left to somebody who likes doing it? >His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. >Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” This attitude absolutely floors me. You absolutely want a diversity of attitudes and skills on any team and that includes having some people who worry more about building the right thing and other people who worry more about building the thing right. Those are complementary attitudes that usually go with complementary skillsets.

alain_gilbert 9y ago
You said something that reach me so much: "tooling". I sometime feels like if you don't have good tools, it's almost impossible for the employees to be productive or motivated. I often see some people working in the most unproductive way possible (to my eyes) that it actually discourage me. I'm left wondering how they can even get anything done when spending so much time doing simple tasks.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Yeah, I sometimes joke that the average developer is a somebody who pushes their code with a series of repetitive git commands typed in unreliably, deploys unreliably with a repetitive set of shell commands, relies almost totally on a battery of bored, robotically clicking manual testers and believes that he is automating people out of a job. I think one of the most underrated (and almost totally ignored) parts of the mythical man month was the notion of the toolsmith being a dedicated member of a good software team who doesn't work on features.

m_fayer 9y ago

After you have a good decade of experience under your belt, most programming is... easy. Sure maybe not if you're working on self driving cars or game engines or kernel modules, but then the programming is only half the point anyway - the rest is math and science. But if you're not working on one of those but doing something more typical, and you're decently experienced and competent (and maybe also not compulsively chasing the bleeding edge), then programming is often just cranking out features, a steady drip of success. So of course the path of maximum pleasure is to crank out code. What's harder than coding? Smartly balancing the stakeholders. Maintaining the discipline, motivation, and knowhow required to maintain the engineering process - testing, documentation, CI, etc. Herding the cats that are a group of programmers, managing the egos, ensuring that a team stays aligned on style and architecture, that's the hard stuff.

pjmlp 9y ago
The problem many programmers face, is that for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have. So of course, some find it easier just to code away without having to deal with other humans. Personally, I get bored to death on the projects where I happen to be a lone dev.
- m_fayer 9y ago
  Past a certain point of career progression, soft skills are a necessity in most industries. I don't see why it should be different with software.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have... Only because technical decision making is poorly structured in most organizations. Or it's clear but evaluation of decisions and decision-makers is poor. If it were: - get feedback from these N<3 people - here's how you do that - they are required to give clear decisions - within X days ...it wouldn't matter so much that Engineer McCodeface wasn't the best at attending happy hours, back-scratching, etc.
  - 9y ago

dazzer 9y ago

Hah this is pretty much me at my current joint... and the worst part is it just feels like there's nothing left after.

downvote_me 9y ago

There is a huge amount of insight on this post and I could not upvote this story enough. It is exactly the onboarding process and all the BS/political powerplay and non-productive rhetorics that pass that exact message to a programmer. Multiply this by ten if you happen to be a non-native developer in a mostly ethnic company where your language skills are below native. So -even though it is never clearly said in the open- the message gets to be 'you are just a "foreign" code monkey'.

ju-st 9y ago

I think managers begin to BS around and only caring about paychecks for similar reasons. It's not only the lowest level in companies (programmers, engineers...) who grow tired of non cooperating higher ups.

pipio21 9y ago

As someone who has been programmer and now hires lots of programmers, there are things in life you can't buy, like love, or in this case, respect. I learned motorola assembler, then intel's when I was a kid and have been programming all my life,studied engineering and made a software company from scratch. Programmers respect me in a way they do not respect an MBA, no matter the title or the money they have. In a company it is a big problem. You can't see it, it is invisible but man you could sense it, it is a very strong force.

AllegedAlec 9y ago

This hits a little too close to home for me. I cannot count the number of times per that one of the following situations has happened: - I go to our designers with an inconsistency, omission or even an outright contradiction in the design just to hear that this is how it was designed and that the client approved this design, so we should implement it precisely as the design says. - Development is slowed down/held back by technical debt and odd implementation choices. When I suggest we fix this, I get told that fixing what isn't broken doesn't earn us money, so I should work around it for now. - I have a suggestion for some process improvement (for example: developer post-mortems, including developers in the design review process), to get told that it's already been tried at some point in the past (usually back in the really early days of the company when there were less than 5 employees) and that it didn't work back then, which means that it will never work, no matter how much has changed since then.

m_fayer 9y ago
That's just a bad company you're working for, it absolutely does not have to be this bad.
rovek 9y ago
> including developers in the design review process I was banging this drum for 2 years at my previous employer. I was always told it's a great idea but the people who knew projects were coming down the line just never reached out to the tech team. We are all tech consumers, letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the possible.
- AllegedAlec 9y ago
  > letting the design team work exclusively with the client is a great way to build the wrong product/features or over/underestimate the art of the possible. Pretty much this. We consistently get screwed over on our schedules because designers just throw a design over our way without asking us for any input along the way.

megaman22 9y ago

It's not just programming; anything where your thoughts and concerns are automatically dismissed and shoved aside becomes incredibly demoralizing. Eventually you either give up completely, or you settle into the tiny corner where you're allowed to have opinions and act on them.

petagonoral 9y ago

Yet another person who I feel I would dislike working with. Maybe, at the start of each post where people ramble in such a binary fashion, they could post a snippet of why they think they can comment with authority on whatever the article content is about. This guys MO ties in nicely with most "well meaning" but utterly clueless folk I've seen when it comes to software development. Even more so when I see his site (https://marcusblankenship.com https://marcusblankenship.com) has: > Let me teach you how to create a high-performing software team

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> His concern for market share and business health is replaced with (...) > His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. Here's your answer. It's because you hired the programmer based on technical competence and not their attitude to servitude in business. You get what you measure. You didn't disqualify me as a candidate because I think your business is boring and I need the money. So don't be surprised that I'll be doing my job as effectively as possible - which involves lots of lone coding, unless your internal process is completely bonkers - but I ain't gonna drink the kool-aid. Want someone with a more "professional" attitude? Filter for that during the interview. And that "changing the world" thing? That's just bullshit, and you're not fooling anyone past their teenage years with that. You're not SpaceX. You're not changing shit. Chances are, you're just trying to make money selling the usual butt CRUD everyone else is selling too. If you hire smart people, don't be surprised they know it's bullshit. Programmers want to code because they're programmers. Chefs want to cook because they're chefs. That's what they do. This article only shows hiring laziness, coupled with usual complaining that the company isn't getting more than it asked for. -- EDIT: Ok, this article doesn't only show hiring laziness. The point about how vulnerable enthusiastic people are in the initial period is spot-on and I agree with it. I wrote the above comment because I believe that the article as a whole exemplifies additional lack of understanding of the perspective of programmers, which can lead to extra post-interview disappointment.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zzzcpan 9y ago
It would be strange for a programmer as an employee to care about the business or the product, given that he has to work for a living and has no stake in any of it. It seems to be a common misunderstanding, unicorn employees that want to care about the business don't actually exist, but a lot are willing to lie about it of course.
- hobs 9y ago
  How do you make something better if you dont give a shit? It's not only not strange, its pretty much a job requirement to recognize your job is the stake in the business. Every single programming job I have had has required me to care enough about the product and the business to understand, interpret, and implement things that the business wanted but couldnt fully articulate. That being said, if the business wants you to be both the business and the programmer, they have a broken system and are failing to manage properly

jdowner 9y ago

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude." "You must be an engineer," says the balloonist. "I am," replies the man. "How did you know?" "Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. "The man below says, "You must be a manager." "I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?" "Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault." -- This is the sentiment that I see in the article. It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.

danzig13 9y ago
If the manager / CEO / businessy business person is holistically concerned with the health of the business and the software engineer is only concerned with their domain of expertise, they are relatively childish compared to that person that is expected to know enough about everything and sincerely takes it on.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  And that person is either ignored or swamped in "the process". Or both.

reacweb 9y ago

"He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. An irritating “I told you so” sentiment plagued his comments and feedback." I recognise myself very much in this traits. When I work on a new project, I maintain a diary with a section todo and a section technical debt. It appears, there are always many items in technical debt. The mindset of people is very influenced by their role. A developer is mainly fixing bugs and creating architecture that should be less bug prone. Anticipating problems is our job and does not mean we are negative. We are happy when the technical debt is small. I think that this article shows that people have difficulties to listen to developers and do not grasp their mindset. I am quite happy my boss listen to me. In a previous job, I had a colleague who helped me a lot to get listened to. I think a developer needs to have good stretches of time undisturbed to get work done, but needs to spend time discussing with others to understand their needs and provide his insights. If nobody listen, the developer can only complain like in this article.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I agree. I imagine the beginning of the end is, the agile standup/sprint process. Instead of addressing the code as a whole, we're reduced to picking at one piece at a time in isolation. No development without a customer issue to justify it! Especially the new guy. And to come in after a couple of years of this, and find a code base that is a pile of individual pieces in a loose spaghetti wad, is so absolutely disillusioning. You want to fix it; you know what needs to be done; but you have to add this field to this structure so some UI element can report some crap that hardly anybody cares about instead.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 9y ago
  Just realized this is now me. "A pile of individual pieces in a loose spaghetti wad" exactly describes what I've been made responsible for. Each source file shows scars of sprints where some poor fool was given a story and told "just make it work" with no concern for any big picture.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago

JeanMarcS 9y ago

3 years ago I crossed the ocean to join a team on a project that seemed great. I'm not 25 anymore so it was a big deal, moving my wife and kids (but it's on a Caribbean island, so they were not hard to convince). I was asked to join because of my background in mathematics, my vision on resolving problems, and my programming skills. Not bragging, I'm just a regular guy, but the person recruiting me was the co founder of my company, we know each other for 25 years. So he knows me well and know my skills. I was asked to join for bringing a new vision on some tricky points. Small team, one leader. Almost every time I proposed something new, it was dismissed, and sometimes with contempt. Of course it's something they worked on for several years, and they tried a lot of solutions before I joined, so some of my idea were surely already tested and all. But I ended up doing some UI on jquery (yeah, I know...) and became miserable as time passed. Because, you know, before even be sure that the core was working, they wanted a fancy interface... Ended bad. I finally quit after 18 months of doing the same stuff again and again, as the UI changed every time a new idea came up. My point is I totally understand the point of the article. I came with a bag full of ideas and happiness on working on that. I ended doing shitty stuff and feeling uninterested and bored about programming shit all day.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

azangru 9y ago

"Just want to code" as opposed to what? After reading the article, I am not sure I understand what he wants programmers to do.

firepoet 9y ago
I don't think the author wants programmers to "do" anything. Instead, they want managers to allow programmers to bring their whole selves to their jobs. That means not blockading their ideas from being implemented, regardless of what realm they belong in. If a programmer has a product idea, they should have a chance to prove it's a good one. If they have a process idea, it should be considered. And so on...

humanrebar 9y ago

> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” To be fair, part of an engineer's job is to give her opinion on when you're not building the right thing because you're building the right thing in the wrong way. Building something with 10-100X more cost, unacceptable bug rates, or a pivot-unfriendly design means losing money in many (most?) contexts.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
It can always be debugged in the next sprint! Just pick up another item from the board and keep coding; if we get behind we'll just hire some more college grads.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  "Will this feature be profitable if it requires X more engineers per Y users?" If the answer is yes, then I guess it's fine.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Until the code base becomes so intractable, such a dinosaur of brittle features and run-on code that nothing significant can be done without exhaustive debugging. Then no group is large enough to make good progress. Loose wads of code with random dependencies make the effort grow geometrically. No growth in team membership can keep up with that for long. The only solution is to tightly control dependencies, write good abstractions and keep to them religiously, etc. So many, many projects head off this particular cliff. They pretend to have life for a while, reducing the feature set in each drop to smaller and smaller items. Relabelling a bug fix a feature, and features overrun the sprint/release and get relabeled 'bugs' so you can keep developing through the test and release phases. So many of us recognize the syndrome. But so little gets done about it, especially in large companies.
    - humanrebar 9y ago

tetron 9y ago

Some of these responses speak to the difference between "programming" and "software engineering". If you want people to hack code without regard for what it is for, you get programmers. If you want a team that is fully engaged in building a product (which means the whole life cycle from requirements to deployment) you need software engineers. If you disempower developers from that kind of decision making, it doesn't matter what their title is.

thisisit 9y ago

Wow. This article really resonated with me. I was "Jamie" until 2 months ago. I choose my jobs very carefully. So when this company had a reputation of hiring the best, I was beyond excited. The interview process was great. I really liked interacting with the (future) manager. And....things went downhill in the very first month. In the first team meeting VP announced that the manager was moving on. All the while I could see it was not mutual agreement between the manager and VP. But, I thought that was not my problem. A meeting was set with the new manager and there it dawned to me that I was in huge trouble. The new guy wanted me to do a presentation in front of the VP and other C-level executives. "But I am not aware of the project requirements" I said. He summarily ignored my objections. On landing in front of the VP and C-level people I was criticised for not knowing the project requirements. While the old manager tried to help me, the new guy kept his mouth shut. Later the new manager offered me a half ass apology. That proved to be the last straw and I became the person who just wanted to code.

lbill 9y ago

TL;DR: I lived this situation on a shitty firm. It's depressing. But "good" firms do exist, don't lose hope! I lived this situation : I got hired as a developer and got involved into making the product better and improving our processes. But the firm was (and still is) utter shit. It was painful and I was unhappy. Some people there are still trying to do a good job and they have had several episodes of burn-out. Some other just lowered their standard and accept to get paid to poop some ugly code and apply useless processes (some might be happy, but most of them are dead inside). I just gave up on this nonsense and quit, and was lucky enough to find a much better place. My new firm (not that "new", it's been more than a year now) is not perfect and can definitely be improved... But motivation and commitment into improving things are actually welcome, and it works!

aviso5 9y ago

Programmers can't into graphic design - https://youtu.be/NM1UeFFCofY https://youtu.be/NM1UeFFCofY

prsy 9y ago
This is spam

dgreensp 9y ago

This article comes to entirely the wrong conclusion, and I am very encouraged at the number of commenters pointing it out. Engineers engineer. They are highly trained professionals who are doing their job when they are figuring out how to build something, improve something, or fix something, often with the goal of being able to develop new features quickly without an inordinate number of bugs. Your engineering team shouldn’t be running your business. Even if they have good ideas. And in practice, they will be overruled immediately, anyway, the moment someone with any real authority makes a roadmap or a key decision, because they are engineers. They aren’t answerable to the board. They haven’t studied the market and competitive landscape in depth. They can’t pivot the company. There’s something perverse and The Office-like about diagnosing Jamie as a problem “but it’s not his fault.” Engineer runs into boss’s office: “Sir, code quality is critically low. I suggest we begin paying down technical debt before it’s too late.” Boss, smiling to camera: “This is Jamie. When he started, he was a team player. He believed in the vision. He didn’t spend all day nit-picking about things like code quality. Look at him now! I don’t blame Jamie, though. I blame myself. If I had made Jamie feel like his big ideas and product insights were welcome here, early on, he wouldn’t have devolved into seeing himself as a mere code monkey.”