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> I would agree with this, you need to be careful. I've seen a friend start at a new company with a horrendous code base, bring up the issues and be let go beca

by Aaargh20318 8y ago

> I would agree with this, you need to be careful. I've seen a friend start at a new company with a horrendous code base, bring up the issues and be let go because they hurt / offended the existing developers. I'm not sure if I agree. As a programmer I feel my primary responsibility is towards the code, not the company, not my colleagues feelings, not the customer. There are other roles who speak for them (sales, product owner, managers, etc.), I speak for the code. When you get into the office in the morning, you hang both your coat and your ego on the coat rack, you can pick them back up when you leave. If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work, then by all means. Doesn't matter if the person who suggested it is a senior with 20 years experience or the fresh out of college guy/girl who started just last week. You judge the idea on it's own merits, not by who suggested it. I really don't get the tendency of allistic people to involve emotions in parts of their life where it's not helpful at all.

LandR 8y ago
> When you get into the office in the morning, you hang both your coat and your ego on the coat rack, you can pick them back up when you leave. If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work, then by all means. Doesn't matter if the person who suggested it is a senior with 20 years experience or the fresh out of college guy/girl who started just last week. You judge the idea on it's own merits, not by who suggested it. >I really don't get the tendency of allistic people to involve emotions in parts of their life where it's not helpful at all. I complete agree
wool_gather 8y ago
> You judge the idea on it's own merits, not by who suggested it. > I really don't get the tendency [...] to involve emotions [...] You're absolutely right: if someone has a good idea for improvement, it should be adopted regardless of who they are. The difficulty is that the suggestion of a total rewrite is not-infrequently prompted by a mostly-emotional reaction. It may not be taking all the important objective factors into account, so you have to be careful to assess whether it truly is a good idea.
GVIrish 8y ago
I agree that ideas should be judged on their merits but you're still dealing with human beings. Someone could approach a bad codebase and say, "Here are some ways we could improve X, Y, and Z," but you could have another person say, "This was done in the stupidest way possible, we have to throw all this crap out." If someone approaches things politely and professionally then no one should have a problem with constructive suggestions for improvement. But people sometimes approach things in a combative or disrespectful manner and that's when you run into problems.
saganus 8y ago
> If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work But how do you objectively measure "improvement of the code"? Maybe it's something fairly obvious like better performance, less bugs, etc, but a lot of times it's very hard to tell if there was actually an improvement or just a different way of doing the same thing, except at the added cost of re-implementing those 3 years of work. And for the record, I agree with you in that you (we) should leave your ego at the door, and if some young whippersnapper can do better than you, then you should be able to leverage that and increase the productivity/performance of the team/company. However I've seen it happen many times where someone thinks they will improve the code but in reality (like others have said) they don't have the correct context and forget about a lot of stuff that their "improvement" should take into account but doesn't... and then once they do the "aha!" moment kicks in and they realize why it wasn't as easy to improve as they first thought.

LandR 8y ago

> When you get into the office in the morning, you hang both your coat and your ego on the coat rack, you can pick them back up when you leave. If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work, then by all means. Doesn't matter if the person who suggested it is a senior with 20 years experience or the fresh out of college guy/girl who started just last week. You judge the idea on it's own merits, not by who suggested it. >I really don't get the tendency of allistic people to involve emotions in parts of their life where it's not helpful at all. I complete agree

wool_gather 8y ago

> You judge the idea on it's own merits, not by who suggested it. > I really don't get the tendency [...] to involve emotions [...] You're absolutely right: if someone has a good idea for improvement, it should be adopted regardless of who they are. The difficulty is that the suggestion of a total rewrite is not-infrequently prompted by a mostly-emotional reaction. It may not be taking all the important objective factors into account, so you have to be careful to assess whether it truly is a good idea.

GVIrish 8y ago

I agree that ideas should be judged on their merits but you're still dealing with human beings. Someone could approach a bad codebase and say, "Here are some ways we could improve X, Y, and Z," but you could have another person say, "This was done in the stupidest way possible, we have to throw all this crap out." If someone approaches things politely and professionally then no one should have a problem with constructive suggestions for improvement. But people sometimes approach things in a combative or disrespectful manner and that's when you run into problems.

saganus 8y ago

> If someone can improve the code by tossing away 3 years of my work But how do you objectively measure "improvement of the code"? Maybe it's something fairly obvious like better performance, less bugs, etc, but a lot of times it's very hard to tell if there was actually an improvement or just a different way of doing the same thing, except at the added cost of re-implementing those 3 years of work. And for the record, I agree with you in that you (we) should leave your ego at the door, and if some young whippersnapper can do better than you, then you should be able to leverage that and increase the productivity/performance of the team/company. However I've seen it happen many times where someone thinks they will improve the code but in reality (like others have said) they don't have the correct context and forget about a lot of stuff that their "improvement" should take into account but doesn't... and then once they do the "aha!" moment kicks in and they realize why it wasn't as easy to improve as they first thought.