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Forcing a new "unrespected" hire to engage in a broken system is such wasted potential. These are maybe the only people who can change the system for the better
by kirykl 8y ago
Forcing a new "unrespected" hire to engage in a broken system is such wasted potential. These are maybe the only people who can change the system for the better. Their unfiltered view can help identify inefficiencies in ways entrenched workers cannot. But instead companies force the most manual, annoying processes no one wants on them, until they are crushed by the weight of status quo and become part of the problem.
- reitanqild 8y agoLetting new people who don’t thoroughly understand the old system write a new one seems like a recipe for another broken system.
- kirykl 8y agoMy point is that companies should welcome the feedback, facilitate and encourage it. Not that new people should re-write a new system
- majormajor 8y agoI agree completely with this, but getting back to the human factors: - It's a lot easier to welcome feedback that comes in a form like "can you tell me about xyz?" [answer] "would it make sense to do abc instead?" than "xyz is shit, let's rip it out and do abc, jesus" - the ego of the new employee shouldn't make them feel above learning the nasty details, or be fragile enough that they get frustrated if the answer is something like "abc might have some other problems, we're thinking about doing ijk, but in the meantime we don't touch this code much and it's not in a public-facing area, so we have other stuff higher on the roadmap." The manager can also avoid a lot of potential problems by being up front about "by the way, here are the pain areas we know about, we're slowly tackling them one by one, let me know if you spot anything else you think we could add to the list."
- compiler-guy 8y agoA lot of times if you say, "I'm having trouble understanding how module X does Y, and why it works that way." And the developer will say, "Yeah, I kind of hacked that together when the requirements changed. In a perfect world, it would get rewritten, but I've had a bunch of other things higher priority." So you come to the code trying to understand why it is that way, and the developer will criticize it themselves.
- majormajor 8y agoYep. And then you understand that you weren't wrong, and the opportunity for improvement is there, when time is available, but you haven't risked alienating people by treating them as if they're idiots for writing imperfect code.
- zelos 8y agoFor every story like this, though, there are probably 10 where the new hire didn’t know better than everyone else. I know I’ve dealt with plenty of people like that.
- dlwdlw 8y agoThere's that saying: if you speak the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they will kill you.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoThe ones with no sense of humor will kill you anyway.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoHow about forcing him or her to articulate why the system is broken with code instead of saying vague things about tech debt?
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoHow about simply asking?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoWell of course. I hope no one is actually forcing them, but professionally forcing them is what we're talking about.