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How to Make Other Developers Hate to Work with You

272 points by turingbook 8y ago

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
I'm in healthcare and this translates wonderfully into my field. Especially with being one staff short than have all, and one be negative.
arandr0x 8y ago
In my experience people provide excuses because they're being addressed by management in a way that is unnecessarily negative and/or management is wanting to find "guilty people" and not work out which is the best person for the job of fixing things. That the article is clearly refusing to even mention this casts a big shadow over the rest of its conclusions. Some of the other things are the result of personality (like taking credit or sloppiness) but making excuses is 100% context and a defensive coping strategy literally every time I have seen or done it.
- P_I_Staker 8y ago
  Yup, "no excuses" is a stupid attitude. Say I wanted you alone to get me to Mars tomorrow. It's absurd to say "no excuses" when you fail. It's possible that you're making understandable demands, or they just don't know how to do it faster.
rojobuffalo 8y ago
I was just imagining the opposites of these and remembering some of my favorite people I ever worked with. I've only ever worked with 2 developers who I didn't like, and they fit this list almost perfectly. Be humble, be kind.
neokantian 8y ago
As mentioned above, either the code works or it doesn’t … but it needs to work in combination with all the code being added to the codebase by your teammates. That is Linus' job (or one of his trusted lieutenants). Kernel contributors generally do not interact with each other directly. There are simply too many kernel contributors to hold all kinds of "team meetings". The problems that the article mentions, exist mostly in a corporate environment. Virtual, distributed teams generally do not have these problems. Software engineering is probably the most collaborative work in today’s world. Yes, but successful software, such as the linux kernel, is not developed in the way he believes it is. What corporate IT typically does, is certainly not a reference. A manager who doesn’t understand this is a manager who doesn’t understand software engineering. A manager who does not read, evaluate, and merge pull requests, is not a manager; and does indeed not understand software engineering. The article complains about the side effects of one particular, rather outdated approach to software engineering. You will, for example, not hear the PostgreSQL or the Debian team complain about that kind of issues.
- drugme 8y ago
  What corporate IT typically does, is certainly not a reference. The article was in no way specific to "corporate IT". But, literally by definition -- we're talking about the huge mass of applications that run most of the planet, here -- overall, "corporate IT" is way more representative than the handful of elite open source projects you're referring to.
meuk 8y ago
Common misconception, but that graph does not explain the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's actually more like a linear curve, it's just a little flatter than the graph of y = x. The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the best people underestimate their relative abilities, and the worst overestimate. So, the worst 10% may estimate they are about average, while the top 10% might estimate they are in the top 20%. These are more realistic figures than the graph used in this article.
- ltbarcly3 8y ago
  People try to shoehorn Dunning-Kruger into situations where it doesn't make much sense. Dunning-Kruger boils down to something a lot like "people tend to think other people are like themselves". So if you are low-skill at some task, you tend to think other people are low-skill, and as a result you see yourself as roughly average. If you are high-skill at some task you tend to think that other people are also high skill, so you over-estimate the average skill level. This article is an example of shoehorning it in when it makes little sense, and I argue that they are claiming that Dunning-Kruger says the opposite of what it actually does. Yes, people can be arrogant and incompetent, but they can also be arrogant and highly competent. Dunning-Kruger would imply that someone who is highly competent would not be likely to be arrogant, since they would overestimate other people relative to themselves, and as a result they would give more credence to the ideas of others than is warranted given their relative skill levels. A total incompetent would indeed overestimate their own ability, but they would still see themselves as roughly average, which you wouldn't think is likely to be the trigger for an arrogant attitude. All people will from time to time feel like the ideas of another person are silly or not worth listening to, but of course it is considered extremely rude to express those feelings. I think arrogance is just the expression of those feelings, which makes it a symptom of poor socialization.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    > So if you are low-skill at some task, you tend to think other people are low-skill Dunning-Kruger effect is not a way of thinking or reasoning about yourself or others, but a cognitive bias. You need to be put into a quick decision making mode where you have to compare your skill to others for it to skew your assessment.
ourmandave 8y ago
As a solo developer who does all these, I have a lot of self-loathing.
- duxup 8y ago
  The worst are the "What the hell was I even doing here?!?!? / What does this even mean?" moments. Like at one point I thought this code was obvious and worked great. I remember feeling that way about it and feeling all accomplished here, but now I don't feel that way and this code seems impenetrable or at least a big hassle now...
  - BerislavLopac 8y ago
    Software developers often forget that their biggest critic is their future self.
  - widforss 8y ago
    Software development is the continual discovery that you were an idiot two weeks ago.
    - duxup 8y ago
      God knows. Especially when you're new like me. I go back even after a month and "Oh man I'd never do it like that again." No to say it didn't work or was even bad but I just found a better pattern to handle that case that I'd use by default now and it changes so much.
      - edmundsauto 8y ago
        My advice: see if you can rewire your internal rewards. That feeling is the acknowledgement that you learned something. The fact our ancient rewards system considers it embarrassing is of little importance.
        widforss 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deckar01 8y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20190222151703/https://anaxi.com/blog/2019/02/20/how-to-make-other-developers-hate-to-work-with-you/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190222151703/https://anaxi.com... Edit: The domain is unreachable for me, I assumed it was for others also. It is still unreachable for me for some reason.
vharuck 8y ago
I thunk there's a second "flavor" of arrogance, where a person believes they're the smartest, but not most knowledgeable, in the room. These people will openly admit they can improve and seek training, partly because they believe they're capable of anything. They don't think they're at the top of the mountain, just that their mountain has no peak. The real problem is they believe "lazy" coworkers will eventually be below them in every subject. They may seek out colleagues' advice some times, but likely will never return because they "get it" now." They'll act like a "jack and master of all trades." This can be nice in small teams, but usually leads to components nobody (not even the arrogant one) can understand let alone maintain. So experts need to be brought in, anyway. These people let the quick ascent of "Mount Ignorance" multiple subjects get to their head. No such thing as a Renaissance man anymore. Sadly, I'm that flavor of arrogance.
- emsal 8y ago
  That take might be overly cynical. People who have a jack-of-all-trades skill set might not necessarily build the best components themselves, but might be able to bring some big-picture insight that more specialized developers don't have the awareness for, leading the team in the right direction. I'm not suggesting you transition into becoming a PM or Architect or anything like that, just saying that developers like you count, too. If you have a decent work ethic, then you and your unique brand of knowledge-seeking have something to bring to the table.
- balabaster 8y ago
  > "usually leads to components nobody can understand let alone maintain" As you advance up the mountain, you will learn to see complexity simply. When you make this realization, your components will simplify dramatically. You must learn to see simply before you can design simply. It just takes time. There's nothing wrong with this, humility doesn't mean giving up your belief that you're capable of anything. We were all born without any knowledge. We all learned everything we needed to know to get where we are today. We've put men on the moon. We've sent probes to escape our solar system. We've sent submarines to the bottom of the ocean. Humans have the capability to do anything we put our minds to. You can too. Everything you understand today, you've learned in the short lifespan you've had. Today you will learn more, and tomorrow and the next. Just because you find humility in your place, doesn't mean you're not capable of anything.
expertentipp 8y ago
Sorry, but real life situation is infinitely more complicated. Crybullies, manipulative people, people driven by greed to have power over others, hazing the new team member for whatever reason. Some are much more likely and zealous to report colleagues to the supervisors, some less. Some are more likely to be listened by the supervisors, some less. In unlucky circumstances, couple of rounds of conversations with managers and suddenly you are the asshole nobody wants to work with.
zzzcpan 8y ago
Referencing Dunning-Kruger effect in any topic on software engineering is very arrogant and pretentious on itself. This says more about the author, than other people's stupidity. The article is just bad.
- throwaway29492 8y ago
  Also the "Negativity is infectious." feel-good bullshit. "If someone complains, it focuses the attention on the negative side of things." (...after a whole article complaining about behavior s/he does not like, ironically) If you want to see big disasters look in organizations where warnings are ignored as "negativity" and people blame the messengers.
  - P_I_Staker 8y ago
    Also, sometimes relentless negativity has some fringe benefits (moderate perfectionism). There's pros and cons. Just don't share that attitude with your coworkers. Hold yourself to a high standard, but be more relaxed with others.
- hnbroseph 8y ago
  why does it "say more about the author"? does your comment about Dunning-Kruger "say more about you" than the author?
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    Well, if you use a fictional interpretation of something known as a justification to claim that other people are stupid - you provide nothing of value regarding other people. And the only thing that can be extracted from this is that you feel the need to claim that other people are stupid.
darkstar999 8y ago
Ironically this domain is blocked at work for being a "spam url".
stephsmithio 8y ago
A lot of good nuggets in here. Dunning-Kruger and Mt. Stupid is one, but I especially like this quote "meetings are just scheduled interruptions".
crdrost 8y ago
Example of the arrogance mentioned in the first point: I have met folks who have seriously argued to me that their code contained no technical debt because "We wrote it right the first time." The code at the time was something in the range of 50,000 lines (so assuming 30 lines of code per page, 500 pages per textbook, you'd have to read ~3 textbooks on the subject of what their code does to understand it) and contained no test suite... and maybe 5% of the code was comments. Sloppiness seems to come with enough examples... but I must say that it's not really a direct problem unless you are in a supervisory role and nevertheless insist on modifying the codebase, as that makes it significantly harder to correct you on your sloppiness. Disrespect of others' time is being directly connected to meetings here -- I sympathize but I do think that the bigger issue is that "deep work" is best done in ~2-hour uninterrupted batches, and so a company culture which encourages actively scheduling those on shared calendars so that we can have "open spaces" for meetings during other parts of the day, would help a lot. Especially, I am growing more confident that meetings which exist should revolve around some decision to be made that needs input from a bunch of people -- in other words, every meeting is a negotiation and if it's just a "progress update" or a "question and answer" session it should be moved to an asynchronous medium like Slack or (to a lesser extent) email. If you insist on daily standups at least have the courtesy to schedule them in the afternoon so that when I come in off of my morning commute having thought, "I am going to do X, then Y, then Z" I am not burdened by "I have only 1 hour to work on X before I have to drop everything for the daily standup..." I am probably more guilty of the constant negativity, I think a piece of wisdom from Seth Freeman is helpful here: that one wants to separate problems from people and be hard on problems, soft on people. You can be constantly be negative towards a problem and this will be tolerable if you are consistently cheerful towards the people who might have other needs with which they pursue those ends. "I am really worried that without a proper auth strategy we may get hacked, I know that you all strongly value being able to go forward without wasting time on such a frustratingly difficult problem, I fully understand that, but there has got to be some way that we can get a proper auth strategy which doesn't bog us down so that we're also not trivially hackable" is a very negative position but it somehow doesn't carry the same "drag" as "you're so stupid, trying to implement this insecure thing, you're going to be the reason we get hacked." Greediness is a hard thing, definitely, but I would observe that all of the examples seem to have to do with private communication channels, and I wonder whether that's endemic to the situation. I also wonder how it subdivides with a manager taking credit for the successes of their team -- in some cases this respect is due and in some cases you feel like "we spent more time evading my boss than being led by them!"... I think the weakest part of the article was "disregard for the team," I feel like that's just a catchall for "doing anything that was annoying to me personally" and it's like "well yeah but that's not helpful." I think any friction can be couched as "disregarding the team" whereas true disregard has something to do with "you went off and made your own decisions and never told any of the rest of us about it and we could have told you that they were not wise decisions because of needs that you would not have been expected to anticipate" -- but the sin there is really just falling out of step with the community and thinking "I can sail this ship entirely on my own!" and I think it's less disregard-for than lack-of-community-with. Like it's great to have ownership of some problem, but keep in constant conversation as well. Lack-of-focus is I guess an irritant but I've never worked with someone where it was so bad as to "hate to work with you"... I think some of that is a lack of leadership-focus, if you have an aggressive timeline to deliver an aggressively minimal product then there is very little room to dither? But that may just be that I have not worked on a hard enough problem where one needs to upfront a serious enough amount of investment to force such dithering. I was also frustrated to see "lack of accountability" defined as "more focused on making excuses than solving problems" because to my mind those are two separate issues, the "I am never to blame because I will point the finger at someone else!" is toxic, but it doesn't become less toxic if someone is like "yeah I mean I was just doing my best with the API results that Phil was giving me, Phil really screwed us over with this one, let's solve the problem by creating an API v2 that doesn't have his shitty endpoint in it, instead the endpoint will work like this, and then I can write code that's actually correct." That revolves around a solution while still having the attendant point-the-finger-and-blame attitude and I don't think that the solution-focus really removes the awfulness of the negativity. Kind of my take aways are: 1. Keep learning and growing, shun practices which set you up as someone who knows everything and has nowhere to grow. 2. Keep honest with yourself about what's really going on, you can massage the description to others but you should be clear on 'we are not meeting this deadline because our contractor is two weeks late delivering this component and we cannot start building this next part without it' -- use that clarity to try to creatively evade those restrictions in the future, 'can we agree on a black-box specification so that you are not blocking my peer developers from working? Like, here's an example JSON file or two that your API will return in response to this query?" -- Do not lie to yourself in cases of "I am screwing this up" or "I am overburdened" or whatever, as those lies breed bigger lies later, that developer who is like "It will be done this week!" for weeks on end. 3. Keep compassion in your heart for everyone else. I am trying to separate that empathy as much as possible from these other criteria and just dump it in one. Do not be aggressive or negative or so with others, they are not the problem, they are not to be recipients of blame... they are fellow human beings who need to also grow and be respected just like you do. Don't say anything which you would not want someone to hear if you said it to their face, for example. 4. This was not really discussed explicitly in this article, but don't settle for mediocrity. Go out on a limb, take a risk, try to do things that might fail. I think one of the things that can really make me hate to work with you is that you would rather copy-paste some convoluted solution that worked once to a problem with considerable limitations, rather than that you're really trying new things, refactoring, simplifying. One thing I perversely love to see in source code is a brute-force approach. Just an "I don't know what the right way is to solve this but there are only 8! different ways this can happen so I'm just going to iterate through the 40,320 of them and see which one is best, we can improve this with some heuristics later." But it has to be an interesting problem of "which of these things is going to be most effective for our users?" for me to have that respect. You stuck your neck out and did something that other people would have just shrugged and said "that sounds impossible, let's move on" and I love that spirit. 5. And finally there is some sort of pride/humility thing going on, don't think that you are the center of the universe and that every other developer exists to make you effective, but rather give up your ego in service of the art that you are creating. If you understand this code as a vehicle for yourself to be validated then I will probably not like working with you, if you understand this code as a joint effort of love and service, I will probably call you my brother or sister.
daveFNbuck 8y ago
It's very weird to describe arrogance as a problem only for people near the bottom in terms of ability. Arrogance is an issue at all skill levels.
- DigitalVerse 8y ago
  This, so much. It's where review comments like "why don't you just do X?" come from, where "X" is a systematic change. Condescension coming from a place of strength doesn't make it okay.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
I think #1 and #6 go hand in hand, and usually results in #2. If you disregard your team, and you're arrogant, your code will likely be sloppy as hell. In my opinion that makes you the worst member of the team. I spoke with a coworker about this and we agreed that you just need to be humble as a software developer: we all are going to screw up, we don't all know all the answers, and we don't know why others in our teams say / know specific things, but we should not take their advise lightly it might of been a painful lesson for them to begin with!
- flr03 8y ago
  My girlfriend being a developer also we end up having this kind of conversation very often and we agreed to say the developers we enjoy the most to work with are knowledgeable but yet humble persons. In my opinions personality traits are often disregarded over technical skills during interviews.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    The best places to work for try to balance both.
harlanji 8y ago
Individuals often have little control over these things, and they are indicative of deeper cultural incentives. Without transgressing some, nothing will get done in many orgs. I see it a lot in big money VC backed startups, much less so in bootstrapped businesses. It’s important to be non-judgmental of people doing these things and simply leave or master Machiavellian moves to clear a path to promotion as other players are, eg. via optics or rallying support to oust “toxic” rivals for the good of the team.
- selflesssieve 8y ago
  Game theory suggests this is true. Dog eat dog. But do you think this is because incentives are misaligned, or do you think that even successful bootstrapped businesses, if around long enough, will fall victim to this culture?
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    >> will fall victim to this culture The issue with this culture is that using optics to achieve an advantage generally works, but is not a good long-term--big-picture strategy. So reasonably, of course you need to learn all of these quirks, just to be able to get rid of the vermin in your org.
    - selflesssieve 8y ago
      I agree if we decouple optics from genuine promotion in which an employee "manages upward" their true successes. I know that people are more nuanced than this and it's not black and white. So this will become quite tautological.
- okaramian 8y ago
  I agree. The system in place is to blame, and those people rose because they are just playing the game that is dealt to them. I'm not so good at the Machievellian political aspect, so I personally opt to leave when I notice behaviors like this are rewarded in the current system. I also wonder if I was able to rise in an organization that functions like this, if I would b the type of person to actually root out that toxicity in the first place.
chooseaname 8y ago
9. Refuse to do any maintenance and only work on new projects. 10. Hide your actual productivity. IE: get done with your coding tasks in half the time, leaving other devs have to fix all the bugs that QA kick back. (This is probably a managerial issue, actually, but perpetuated by devs who do # 9.)
- rojobuffalo 8y ago
  #9 for sure. Probably a side effect of being sloppy or writing bad code.
  - NedIsakoff 8y ago
    My version of #9 I'm dealing with is: Is this an feature that a customer will use? Or is it internal improvement? Yes to first, no to latter.
    - justwalt 8y ago
      Are you saying that your team hasn’t done enough of the latter, or that they don’t focus enough on the former?
      - NedIsakoff 8y ago
        We haven’t done enough of the latter. I’d love to automate and improve a lot of stuff but our project manager is pretty much always client visible first.
- daxfohl 8y ago
  Or, augmenting #9, the team lead who takes all the interesting work and doles out compliance etc to everyone else.
  - anumberofopt 8y ago
    I really don't know how a team lead would find the time with all that turnover. Training is a bitch.
braythwayt 8y ago
There's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in myself at one time or another. I sometimes feel like I don't see anti-patterns as I go through my career, I fall over them and sprawl on the floor.
- mont 8y ago
  The important thing is that you can recognize your own problematic behavior, and actively work on fixing it. Nobody's perfect, but I imagine there's a reason the author put #1 as #1 ;)
  - P_I_Staker 8y ago
    Yup, looking at common problematic behavior without reflecting inward, is an issue in and if itself. People often behave this way for a reason. You're liable to for the same reason.
- bjourne 8y ago
  I read the article and thought to myself that there's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in my coworkers. :) Fwiw, I think articles like there are really bullshit. They just make self-doubting people doubt themselves even more and the real assholes never understands that the advice applies to them.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  There's a common quote about an expert being someone who has made every possible mistake in the domain at least once. So you may be on the right path!
jd75 8y ago
People love to work with me, but managers love all of those flaws.
- tome 8y ago
  Did you mean "People hate"?
  - jd75 8y ago
    No, I mean I don't get promoted for trying to hear what other people say, while managers can't say enough nice things about the hipster-ass who breaks everything he touches trying to turn it into GraphQL no matter what. But I didn't write that very clearly the first time.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
ataturk 8y ago
Refuse to write tests because they are "below you." I am finding out this is a cultural thing (national, not corporate).
denart2203 8y ago
It is not hard on practice :)
koboll 8y ago
Holy crap, is >gives cryptic names for variables, or at best not self-explanatory sure a big one. It's part of a category of small decisions that dramatically increase cognitive load when accumulated. Along with it: >Passing many arguments into functions with names that have no relevance to their role inside the function, so you constantly have to look up which argument maps to which function param >Needlessly reorganizing data structures or renaming variables so that it becomes more difficult to reason about the flow of data Naming things isn't just the hardest problem in programming, it's also the quickest way to piss off your peers if you're lazy about it.
- vidanay 8y ago
  A former primary developer of my code base had something wired backwards in his brain. The code is full of double negatives: if(!FeatureNotDisabled){ .... } It drives me absolutely bonkers!
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    For me this often happens incrementally. Like they started with "if (FeatureNotDisabled)" and then locally refactored the code until it was "if (!FeatureNotDisabled)". The problem is that they then didn't go back for another pass before commit, and reverse the double-negative by changing the variable name and semantics. This could be due to laziness, ignorance (it works, what's the problem?), fear (it works now, let's not break it), or time mismanagement (it took long enough to get it working, no time to make everything "perfect").
    - vidanay 8y ago
      I could understand that evolution, but I have become convinced that this particular developer simply worked with negative logic in his brain. Even the configuration files will have: Feature1Disabled=False Feature2Disabled=True Feature3Disabled=False Instead of using feature flags to enable a feature, he used feature flags to disable features. He was very consistent and the logic is all correct, simply inverted.
  - 8y ago
sonnyblarney 8y ago
'Arrogance' is more often than not mostly a matter of perception. Truly arrogant people can seem nice - so we generally don't want to ascribe negative qualities like 'arrogant' to them. 'Real arrogance', and even greed, backstabbing - those can also done by people who seem to be well liked. 'Perceptive arrogance' I think is mostly a matter of posture, demeanour and communication. If you smile, let other people talk, have an easygoing manner, and are agreeable, you will not be perceived as 'arrogant' even though you may have all of the qualities of a truly arrogant person. I don't think 'perceived arrogance' has anything to do with actually humility or gauge of one's own abilities, or of one's sense of self importance in the group. If you're terse, blunt, dour or gregarious ... it can be perceived as arrogant. 'Real arrogance' i.e. the notion that one's thoughts and ideals matter more than others etc. I think is not even correlated with posture and communication style. The most successful people in the corporate world are pure political players, and have never cared about outcomes, doing a good job - anything. All they care about is perception and their careers. But they are actually nice enough, generally charismatic. Actually caring caring about a product can simply cause contention, and possibly give the perception of arrogance. I prefer to consider arrogance in terms of measured behaviours, outcomes etc.. Glib political climbers to me are arrogant. Anyone actually trying to 'do a good job' and stepping on toes is just a bad communicator.
kakarot 8y ago
I thought I would make an addendum: > We all know at least one developer who ... will always insist on following “best practices” without understanding why those practices are considered “best” (there is no such thing as best practices that adapt to every team) For any developers out there recently starting on your path, I cannot stress the importance of taking the time to seek out best practices for new skills and technologies you pick up. Find all the "best practices" you can, then ignore some of them for a while with some pilot code, then try to follow a combination of the ones that make most sense to you. Compare the two modules for legibility, clarity, maintainability and conciseness. If, however, your team already has an entrenched way of doing things, don't be that jerk who comes to the party blasting their own music. Follow the existing style guides to a T and only offer advice for improvement after you've spent some time working with them. Even if you immediately recognize a glaring problem in the way things are done, no one is going to take you seriously and you'll just come across as arrogant unless you already have rapport as a perceptive and helpful team member. Take time to understand the culture around you, but don't, as this author suggests, ignore the tried and true devices of other cultures.
- jlokier 8y ago
  I agree. I'd like to add, in my experience some developers firmly (and sometimes loudly, judgementally) join a working environment and espouse best practices they've acquired from a cultural background they've worked in so far. Or read about, or watched a training course about. And they don't know (or care if) they are pushing things which are advertised as "best practice" in some domain or other, but aren't half as universally agreed upon as they think, and aren't half as effective or appropriate as they think in the new job. My point is: Some "best practices" aren't as universally agreed upon as people think, and people are often thinking in a bubble. If you're at a new job, and you see a glaring lack of what you've learned is "essential" best practice, I'd urge caution in assuming your new team are ignorant or that your managers are as clueless as you think at first, even if it looks messy and disorganised. Of course they might be clueless! But it takes time and deep questioning to be sure. Of course your experience should be brought into each new place you work. You're hired to bring in what you know, not just to fill a seat. By all means talk about your experience, about things you have actually done which worked well, and about what industry leaders are currently talking about. But if you feel the need to "teach" everyone straight away how to work better, give it time and consider the possibility that people might have given it considerable thought and experience of their own. They might even be familiar with much of what you're talking about, and rejected it or found a different approach. (Or they might not - that's to be discovered.) I say this because I've seen people turn up and, in effect, try to start fights long before they have spent the time to figure out (a) others in the team are quite experienced and familiar with the same practices but have decided on something else, (b) different industry bubbles actually do have different best practices for similar problems, and (c) they can't see some kinds of development strategy that are in use, because subtlety.
CodeSheikh 8y ago
From my experience at various companies, "technical managers" fit well into most of these categories. Because actively coding and managing a team of multiple developers can bring most of these issues out of you. Example: "getting away with your architectural decisions because you are presenting your ideas with a managerial authority and ignoring better solutions presented by other senior developers."
asabjorn 8y ago
> A team with a bad developer is way better off short one developer than it is with a bad element. How do you know that you just didn't communicate your issues well to the person? Is there a way to help them, you and your relationship improve so that you can be a stronger team? We all have blindspots and weaknesses, and weaknesses that fit together like puzzle-pieces tend to find each other until you resolve them. The half-moon is only an illusion, the whole moon is still there. You just don't see it, and you need the whole.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  > How do you know that you just didn't communicate your issues well to the person? When you encounter that person, you'll know. Some people just aren't capable of grocking certain things. I had a guy on my team like this. He just wasn't getting it. At first, I would spend extra time with him, communicating the issue from every possible angle. He would almost always end up producing something so far off base. Everyone else on the team was sync'd but he just never got it. The best part is that he refused to believe that he was incompetent. I say "best", because that gave me an easy way to get him to move on without firing him. I knew if I wrote him up one time, his pride would kick in, and he would start looking for another job. The plan worked perfectly.
finaliteration 8y ago
I’ll add another one: Nitpicking constantly. I’ve worked with people who will fight and argue over every. Single. Detail. It drives me insane and usually makes me quit faster than anything else when I encounter those people.
- whttheuuu 8y ago
  This. There are 2 types of developers: those who enjoy philosophizing about programming minutiae and then there are those who enjoy shipping products.
  - finaliteration 8y ago
    Don’t get me wrong. There are times when details should be discussed, but not when it’s coming out of some desire to engage in a power struggle and show everyone else how smart and in control you are.
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    There's a subtype who ignores your review request for weeks but delivers a verbal drive-by nitpicking, as he's leaving work early, which focuses on trivial matters of opinion and ignores obvious bugs in functionality.
- lawn 8y ago
  Not just nitpicking either. It's enlarging a minimal problem to make it a major problem that must at all costs be solved.
Dzugaru 8y ago
> Developers can’t easily go back to where they were right > before an interruption. They need to get into the mindset > for development and then slowly trace back to where they > left off. And every fellow developer knows that. I used to think like that too, but after 10 years programming in many environments, now I'm inclined to disagree. If I cannot refocus immediately after interruption - I know I'm doing something wrong. Maybe the thing is too complex and must be cut down to smaller pieces, maybe I didn't keep enough notes or thinking through - anyhow nowadays I cannot work without a clear understanding of what simple piece of what complex piece I'm doing and where I've written down the other pieces I should do next.
- hnbroseph 8y ago
  > Maybe the thing is too complex and must be cut down to smaller pieces i suspect that for many, it's not necessarily their fault Thing is 'too complex' (though perhaps this is tangential); nor are they necessarily provided the opportunity, time or even permission to 'cut down to smaller pieces'. piles of work, looming deadlines and all that.
- ianstallings 8y ago
  One of the things I do to offset possible interruptions is to write things out or visualize them in some way. It helps me pick back up on the track I was interrupted from, but also has the added benefit of helping visualize the problem, which often leads to a greater understanding. It's a little bit of overhead that can pay off.
- lolc 8y ago
  To me that just sounds like you don't have tasks that require deep thought. And that you've developed habits to cope with interruptions, such as note-taking. To turn a complex thing into a list of simple things can be done by experience as well as by deep thought. But don't think you could get that experience in 5-minute chunks of thinking. To get the experience you need deep thought. Maybe set your sights higher if it's all easy to you? Or enjoy the fruits of experience, of course.
  - 8y ago
scandox 8y ago
Here's a profile of a developer: - Easy going and pleasant. - Really interested in programming and tech in general - Talks intelligently about the problem at hand. Asks all the right questions. Agrees a plan of action in collaboration with colleagues. - Creates systems that definitely appear to work - Code looks pretty sane. Structure is right. Style seems good. - Always very responsive to problems. Jumps straight on them. - Every problem fixed another one seems to pop up. - Eventually you dig into the code and problem space in detail and you find that in a very subtle, even complex way the whole thing is completely wrong, the problem space misunderstood and everything patched over with little fixes to get things working for a particular case. In the end no system created by the person is useable without major remediation by another developer. Anyone experienced this?
- maltesers 8y ago
  Because they're fixing some other problem they want to work on. Not the problem they actually have. They know it.
- mahemm 8y ago
  Sounds like insufficient testing to me. This kind of deep/far reaching issue should have been crashing tests written before others would have seen it. Assuming that there is some testing in their work (if not; there's the answer), my guess would be that it's largely sanity testing of each functionality in a vaccuum. The coaching would probably be to demonstrate more integration-style testing, possibly using whatever tests caught system-level issues that the dev has pushed in the past.
  - kyberias 8y ago
    No, it's just lack of true skill.
  - potta_coffee 8y ago
    Could also be organizational. Constantly shifting whims of stakeholders, etc. Yes, requirements change but changing major requirements without a major refactor can cause these kinds of problems with the code. Or if the developer is being given unreasonable deadlines, no time/resources for testing, etc etc.
say-vagnes 8y ago
Good article. However, I'd like to talk about documentation and comments, as they were mentioned a lot. I think the industry should rely on them less. The trouble is, nobody updates every comment, and documentation is even more out of date. They cannot be automatically verified either. Getting worked up about it is just going to give you stress. Further, it is terribly subjective. Instead, advocate for the other good practices - variable names, clear separation of concerns, single responsibility, functional purity, etc. I have this inkling, actually, that the more comments there are in a function, the worse it is. Even high level overview comments, like some outlining an algorithm, could instead be high-level code, composing the various pieces together. It is very rare that a concept is actually nuanced in code. Instead, it is usually the implementation - and you can improve it. That said, it's a ton of work, and we have to ship a product at the end of the day. So here we are again, discussing tradeoffs in tech, and I think in these cases a comment block is an OK compromise. Just be cognizant that it IS a compromise.
blindwatchmaker 8y ago
Re: documenting code, I've gotten a lot of conflicting advice over the years, with some people insisting code should be documenting, and others insisting on docstrings.
- timw4mail 8y ago
  Best to have a balance, I think: For loosely typed dynamic languages, docblocks on interfaces (function/method definitions, interfaces, etc) are a good idea. For languages that require types in their interfaces, it is helpful for larger units(classes, functions, methods) to have a summary comment. Inline comments are still very useful for explaining how and why of implementation details. While I reject the stance that you should never have comments, I also see cases where better names and simpler logic can alleviate the need for more comments.
fromthestart 8y ago
>Most developers are enthusiastic people, but sometimes you may have the chance (or misfortune) to work with a negative one. Negativity is infectious Western society has a weird optimism bias. I think it goes hand in hand with extroversion bias, and it keeps many people from being genuine. >those developers are clearly at the top of Mount Stupid Frankly, that's insulting. Being a negative or critical person does not make one stupid, on the contrary, I would argue that the skepticism that comes with negativity is an asset for engineering. This advice is carte blanche to dismiss criticism.
- say-vagnes 8y ago
  Sometimes we need to remember that positive interactions make people happy, and negative ones make people sad. And that's what they'll remember about the interaction afterwards. For a lot of people, these basics apply even to technical discussions. Criticizing their code makes them feel bad, and so you are a jerk. Meanwhile, you think you are criticizing their design to help them improve it. This is a mistake on the part of the person receiving criticism, but it's very rare to have a manager or mentor who can point this out to them, and help them dissociate their implementations from their self worth. Couple into this other culture's aversions to even just saying "no", and we have a complex and challenging world to navigate. I'm constantly in search of the team where we don't have to do silly social dances to make sure everyone feels valued, and can just criticize and fix, since the members know they're valued by virtue of being part of the team to begin with. But that is asking a lot of people - they have to have reflected on these issues. Since this is rare, and the larger a team gets, the more likely you'll have to deal with those who haven't dissociated yet. Makes for a great mentorship opportunity if you can find a way to have them "let you in".
  - jlokier 8y ago
    True enough, but it's not just about making anyone happy. Even thick-skinned people have a hard time with another type of negativity: "Negativity" doesn't only mean high quality criticism, or pessimism. It also refers to low quality, demanding, draining, and often competitive and repetitive discussions where critics are full of it. Sometimes there is also bullying, always talking over, making out that coworkers are stupid, taking credit for others work, not pulling their own weight, trying to trick people, manipulating people to their disadvantage, insinuations, word-twisting and game-playing, that sort of thing. That sort of negativity is draining. It's negative in an energy and morale sense. That's not about hurting anyone's feelings, and it's not even about sadness and happiness. It's just that some ongoing interactions drain everyone's energy without giving much back in exchange. Everyone does it occasionally. Some people do it a lot - those can destroy a team and a company.
stcredzero 8y ago
How everyone can be right, but everyone gets annoyed anyways. Cast: Developer A, a younger developer who is recognized company-wide as an expert in the latest features of blb++. Developer B, an older developer who maintains widely used legacy code in blb++ involved in about 80% of a billion dollar multinational's profits. Dev A: Your group should change the coding style in this application to the new standard. Dev B: Sure. But since we don't have good Unit Test coverage in this area, we shouldn't just go in and do it by hand. I need to guarantee correctness. I've done a change this big before using a syntax driven automated code rewrite tool, and one can guarantee correctness if the code structure allows it. If you know of such a tool for blb++, you can help me out and we can do it. (Background for the reader: No such tool exists for blb++ which can guarantee correctness. Such tools do exist for other languages in Dev B's work experience.) Later on, Dev A is grousing about how Dev B is just coming up with esoteric excuses to do nothing. She's kind of put off. Dev B is put off, because he's kind of been accused of making stuff up, even though he's talking from a particularly interesting and valuable part of his work experience. Dev A is correct, in that the new coding style is better, more efficient, and would even prevent mistakes going forwards. Dev B is correct, in that he really needs to guarantee correctness, especially if he's going to make a change that big which has no visible benefit to stakeholders. What's the takeaway?
- mjsaah 8y ago
  Uh, Dev A should take the time to understand Dev B's argument before writing it off as esoteric excuses.
- ajdecon 8y ago
  > What's the takeaway? "Unfortunately this tool doesn't exist for blb++, but we should still improve our coding style for this application. Is there another way to improve our correctness testing? If we allocate some time to improving unit testing, maybe we can do this refactor once we have X% coverage in these critical parts of the codebase." I.e., acknowledge that both goals are valid, and look for alternate solutions to make incremental progress towards both. Finding middle ground is unlikely to be satisfying from either viewpoint. In this example, Dev A isn't getting a quick win from fixing the coding style right away, and Dev B needs to allocate some time to improving testing. But especially when working on big teams and projects, this kind of piece-wise progress is where I've seen most things get done. This kind of solution might be pointed out by either Dev A or B, or they might need to bring in a fresh pair of eyes if they're both already frustrated. :)
cde-v 8y ago
This sounds more like how to make anyone hate to work with you.
john-radio 8y ago
This writer stole "Mount Stupid" from Zach Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) without crediting him! http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475
mnm1 8y ago
Love the article except for the part that encourages developers to rat on other developers. No. Unless another developer is so bad they are putting your job in jeopardy, let them be. It's the manager's job to sort that out and do something about it. Throwing other developers under the bus when ones own job security is not threatened should be the number one thing on this list of asshole things a developer can do by far. By very, very, very far.

272 points by turingbook 8y ago

I'm in healthcare and this translates wonderfully into my field. Especially with being one staff short than have all, and one be negative.

arandr0x 8y ago

In my experience people provide excuses because they're being addressed by management in a way that is unnecessarily negative and/or management is wanting to find "guilty people" and not work out which is the best person for the job of fixing things. That the article is clearly refusing to even mention this casts a big shadow over the rest of its conclusions. Some of the other things are the result of personality (like taking credit or sloppiness) but making excuses is 100% context and a defensive coping strategy literally every time I have seen or done it.

P_I_Staker 8y ago
Yup, "no excuses" is a stupid attitude. Say I wanted you alone to get me to Mars tomorrow. It's absurd to say "no excuses" when you fail. It's possible that you're making understandable demands, or they just don't know how to do it faster.

rojobuffalo 8y ago

I was just imagining the opposites of these and remembering some of my favorite people I ever worked with. I've only ever worked with 2 developers who I didn't like, and they fit this list almost perfectly. Be humble, be kind.

neokantian 8y ago

As mentioned above, either the code works or it doesn’t … but it needs to work in combination with all the code being added to the codebase by your teammates. That is Linus' job (or one of his trusted lieutenants). Kernel contributors generally do not interact with each other directly. There are simply too many kernel contributors to hold all kinds of "team meetings". The problems that the article mentions, exist mostly in a corporate environment. Virtual, distributed teams generally do not have these problems. Software engineering is probably the most collaborative work in today’s world. Yes, but successful software, such as the linux kernel, is not developed in the way he believes it is. What corporate IT typically does, is certainly not a reference. A manager who doesn’t understand this is a manager who doesn’t understand software engineering. A manager who does not read, evaluate, and merge pull requests, is not a manager; and does indeed not understand software engineering. The article complains about the side effects of one particular, rather outdated approach to software engineering. You will, for example, not hear the PostgreSQL or the Debian team complain about that kind of issues.

drugme 8y ago
What corporate IT typically does, is certainly not a reference. The article was in no way specific to "corporate IT". But, literally by definition -- we're talking about the huge mass of applications that run most of the planet, here -- overall, "corporate IT" is way more representative than the handful of elite open source projects you're referring to.

meuk 8y ago

Common misconception, but that graph does not explain the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's actually more like a linear curve, it's just a little flatter than the graph of y = x. The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the best people underestimate their relative abilities, and the worst overestimate. So, the worst 10% may estimate they are about average, while the top 10% might estimate they are in the top 20%. These are more realistic figures than the graph used in this article.

ltbarcly3 8y ago
People try to shoehorn Dunning-Kruger into situations where it doesn't make much sense. Dunning-Kruger boils down to something a lot like "people tend to think other people are like themselves". So if you are low-skill at some task, you tend to think other people are low-skill, and as a result you see yourself as roughly average. If you are high-skill at some task you tend to think that other people are also high skill, so you over-estimate the average skill level. This article is an example of shoehorning it in when it makes little sense, and I argue that they are claiming that Dunning-Kruger says the opposite of what it actually does. Yes, people can be arrogant and incompetent, but they can also be arrogant and highly competent. Dunning-Kruger would imply that someone who is highly competent would not be likely to be arrogant, since they would overestimate other people relative to themselves, and as a result they would give more credence to the ideas of others than is warranted given their relative skill levels. A total incompetent would indeed overestimate their own ability, but they would still see themselves as roughly average, which you wouldn't think is likely to be the trigger for an arrogant attitude. All people will from time to time feel like the ideas of another person are silly or not worth listening to, but of course it is considered extremely rude to express those feelings. I think arrogance is just the expression of those feelings, which makes it a symptom of poor socialization.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  > So if you are low-skill at some task, you tend to think other people are low-skill Dunning-Kruger effect is not a way of thinking or reasoning about yourself or others, but a cognitive bias. You need to be put into a quick decision making mode where you have to compare your skill to others for it to skew your assessment.

ourmandave 8y ago

As a solo developer who does all these, I have a lot of self-loathing.

duxup 8y ago
The worst are the "What the hell was I even doing here?!?!? / What does this even mean?" moments. Like at one point I thought this code was obvious and worked great. I remember feeling that way about it and feeling all accomplished here, but now I don't feel that way and this code seems impenetrable or at least a big hassle now...
- BerislavLopac 8y ago
  Software developers often forget that their biggest critic is their future self.
- widforss 8y ago
  Software development is the continual discovery that you were an idiot two weeks ago.
  - duxup 8y ago
    God knows. Especially when you're new like me. I go back even after a month and "Oh man I'd never do it like that again." No to say it didn't work or was even bad but I just found a better pattern to handle that case that I'd use by default now and it changes so much.
    - edmundsauto 8y ago
      My advice: see if you can rewire your internal rewards. That feeling is the acknowledgement that you learned something. The fact our ancient rewards system considers it embarrassing is of little importance.
      - widforss 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deckar01 8y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20190222151703/https://anaxi.com/blog/2019/02/20/how-to-make-other-developers-hate-to-work-with-you/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190222151703/https://anaxi.com... Edit: The domain is unreachable for me, I assumed it was for others also. It is still unreachable for me for some reason.

vharuck 8y ago

I thunk there's a second "flavor" of arrogance, where a person believes they're the smartest, but not most knowledgeable, in the room. These people will openly admit they can improve and seek training, partly because they believe they're capable of anything. They don't think they're at the top of the mountain, just that their mountain has no peak. The real problem is they believe "lazy" coworkers will eventually be below them in every subject. They may seek out colleagues' advice some times, but likely will never return because they "get it" now." They'll act like a "jack and master of all trades." This can be nice in small teams, but usually leads to components nobody (not even the arrogant one) can understand let alone maintain. So experts need to be brought in, anyway. These people let the quick ascent of "Mount Ignorance" multiple subjects get to their head. No such thing as a Renaissance man anymore. Sadly, I'm that flavor of arrogance.

emsal 8y ago
That take might be overly cynical. People who have a jack-of-all-trades skill set might not necessarily build the best components themselves, but might be able to bring some big-picture insight that more specialized developers don't have the awareness for, leading the team in the right direction. I'm not suggesting you transition into becoming a PM or Architect or anything like that, just saying that developers like you count, too. If you have a decent work ethic, then you and your unique brand of knowledge-seeking have something to bring to the table.
balabaster 8y ago
> "usually leads to components nobody can understand let alone maintain" As you advance up the mountain, you will learn to see complexity simply. When you make this realization, your components will simplify dramatically. You must learn to see simply before you can design simply. It just takes time. There's nothing wrong with this, humility doesn't mean giving up your belief that you're capable of anything. We were all born without any knowledge. We all learned everything we needed to know to get where we are today. We've put men on the moon. We've sent probes to escape our solar system. We've sent submarines to the bottom of the ocean. Humans have the capability to do anything we put our minds to. You can too. Everything you understand today, you've learned in the short lifespan you've had. Today you will learn more, and tomorrow and the next. Just because you find humility in your place, doesn't mean you're not capable of anything.

expertentipp 8y ago

Sorry, but real life situation is infinitely more complicated. Crybullies, manipulative people, people driven by greed to have power over others, hazing the new team member for whatever reason. Some are much more likely and zealous to report colleagues to the supervisors, some less. Some are more likely to be listened by the supervisors, some less. In unlucky circumstances, couple of rounds of conversations with managers and suddenly you are the asshole nobody wants to work with.

zzzcpan 8y ago

Referencing Dunning-Kruger effect in any topic on software engineering is very arrogant and pretentious on itself. This says more about the author, than other people's stupidity. The article is just bad.

throwaway29492 8y ago
Also the "Negativity is infectious." feel-good bullshit. "If someone complains, it focuses the attention on the negative side of things." (...after a whole article complaining about behavior s/he does not like, ironically) If you want to see big disasters look in organizations where warnings are ignored as "negativity" and people blame the messengers.
- P_I_Staker 8y ago
  Also, sometimes relentless negativity has some fringe benefits (moderate perfectionism). There's pros and cons. Just don't share that attitude with your coworkers. Hold yourself to a high standard, but be more relaxed with others.
hnbroseph 8y ago
why does it "say more about the author"? does your comment about Dunning-Kruger "say more about you" than the author?
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Well, if you use a fictional interpretation of something known as a justification to claim that other people are stupid - you provide nothing of value regarding other people. And the only thing that can be extracted from this is that you feel the need to claim that other people are stupid.

darkstar999 8y ago

Ironically this domain is blocked at work for being a "spam url".

stephsmithio 8y ago

A lot of good nuggets in here. Dunning-Kruger and Mt. Stupid is one, but I especially like this quote "meetings are just scheduled interruptions".

crdrost 8y ago

Example of the arrogance mentioned in the first point: I have met folks who have seriously argued to me that their code contained no technical debt because "We wrote it right the first time." The code at the time was something in the range of 50,000 lines (so assuming 30 lines of code per page, 500 pages per textbook, you'd have to read ~3 textbooks on the subject of what their code does to understand it) and contained no test suite... and maybe 5% of the code was comments. Sloppiness seems to come with enough examples... but I must say that it's not really a direct problem unless you are in a supervisory role and nevertheless insist on modifying the codebase, as that makes it significantly harder to correct you on your sloppiness. Disrespect of others' time is being directly connected to meetings here -- I sympathize but I do think that the bigger issue is that "deep work" is best done in ~2-hour uninterrupted batches, and so a company culture which encourages actively scheduling those on shared calendars so that we can have "open spaces" for meetings during other parts of the day, would help a lot. Especially, I am growing more confident that meetings which exist should revolve around some decision to be made that needs input from a bunch of people -- in other words, every meeting is a negotiation and if it's just a "progress update" or a "question and answer" session it should be moved to an asynchronous medium like Slack or (to a lesser extent) email. If you insist on daily standups at least have the courtesy to schedule them in the afternoon so that when I come in off of my morning commute having thought, "I am going to do X, then Y, then Z" I am not burdened by "I have only 1 hour to work on X before I have to drop everything for the daily standup..." I am probably more guilty of the constant negativity, I think a piece of wisdom from Seth Freeman is helpful here: that one wants to separate problems from people and be hard on problems, soft on people. You can be constantly be negative towards a problem and this will be tolerable if you are consistently cheerful towards the people who might have other needs with which they pursue those ends. "I am really worried that without a proper auth strategy we may get hacked, I know that you all strongly value being able to go forward without wasting time on such a frustratingly difficult problem, I fully understand that, but there has got to be some way that we can get a proper auth strategy which doesn't bog us down so that we're also not trivially hackable" is a very negative position but it somehow doesn't carry the same "drag" as "you're so stupid, trying to implement this insecure thing, you're going to be the reason we get hacked." Greediness is a hard thing, definitely, but I would observe that all of the examples seem to have to do with private communication channels, and I wonder whether that's endemic to the situation. I also wonder how it subdivides with a manager taking credit for the successes of their team -- in some cases this respect is due and in some cases you feel like "we spent more time evading my boss than being led by them!"... I think the weakest part of the article was "disregard for the team," I feel like that's just a catchall for "doing anything that was annoying to me personally" and it's like "well yeah but that's not helpful." I think any friction can be couched as "disregarding the team" whereas true disregard has something to do with "you went off and made your own decisions and never told any of the rest of us about it and we could have told you that they were not wise decisions because of needs that you would not have been expected to anticipate" -- but the sin there is really just falling out of step with the community and thinking "I can sail this ship entirely on my own!" and I think it's less disregard-for than lack-of-community-with. Like it's great to have ownership of some problem, but keep in constant conversation as well. Lack-of-focus is I guess an irritant but I've never worked with someone where it was so bad as to "hate to work with you"... I think some of that is a lack of leadership-focus, if you have an aggressive timeline to deliver an aggressively minimal product then there is very little room to dither? But that may just be that I have not worked on a hard enough problem where one needs to upfront a serious enough amount of investment to force such dithering. I was also frustrated to see "lack of accountability" defined as "more focused on making excuses than solving problems" because to my mind those are two separate issues, the "I am never to blame because I will point the finger at someone else!" is toxic, but it doesn't become less toxic if someone is like "yeah I mean I was just doing my best with the API results that Phil was giving me, Phil really screwed us over with this one, let's solve the problem by creating an API v2 that doesn't have his shitty endpoint in it, instead the endpoint will work like this, and then I can write code that's actually correct." That revolves around a solution while still having the attendant point-the-finger-and-blame attitude and I don't think that the solution-focus really removes the awfulness of the negativity. Kind of my take aways are: 1. Keep learning and growing, shun practices which set you up as someone who knows everything and has nowhere to grow. 2. Keep honest with yourself about what's really going on, you can massage the description to others but you should be clear on 'we are not meeting this deadline because our contractor is two weeks late delivering this component and we cannot start building this next part without it' -- use that clarity to try to creatively evade those restrictions in the future, 'can we agree on a black-box specification so that you are not blocking my peer developers from working? Like, here's an example JSON file or two that your API will return in response to this query?" -- Do not lie to yourself in cases of "I am screwing this up" or "I am overburdened" or whatever, as those lies breed bigger lies later, that developer who is like "It will be done this week!" for weeks on end. 3. Keep compassion in your heart for everyone else. I am trying to separate that empathy as much as possible from these other criteria and just dump it in one. Do not be aggressive or negative or so with others, they are not the problem, they are not to be recipients of blame... they are fellow human beings who need to also grow and be respected just like you do. Don't say anything which you would not want someone to hear if you said it to their face, for example. 4. This was not really discussed explicitly in this article, but don't settle for mediocrity. Go out on a limb, take a risk, try to do things that might fail. I think one of the things that can really make me hate to work with you is that you would rather copy-paste some convoluted solution that worked once to a problem with considerable limitations, rather than that you're really trying new things, refactoring, simplifying. One thing I perversely love to see in source code is a brute-force approach. Just an "I don't know what the right way is to solve this but there are only 8! different ways this can happen so I'm just going to iterate through the 40,320 of them and see which one is best, we can improve this with some heuristics later." But it has to be an interesting problem of "which of these things is going to be most effective for our users?" for me to have that respect. You stuck your neck out and did something that other people would have just shrugged and said "that sounds impossible, let's move on" and I love that spirit. 5. And finally there is some sort of pride/humility thing going on, don't think that you are the center of the universe and that every other developer exists to make you effective, but rather give up your ego in service of the art that you are creating. If you understand this code as a vehicle for yourself to be validated then I will probably not like working with you, if you understand this code as a joint effort of love and service, I will probably call you my brother or sister.

daveFNbuck 8y ago

It's very weird to describe arrogance as a problem only for people near the bottom in terms of ability. Arrogance is an issue at all skill levels.

DigitalVerse 8y ago
This, so much. It's where review comments like "why don't you just do X?" come from, where "X" is a systematic change. Condescension coming from a place of strength doesn't make it okay.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

I think #1 and #6 go hand in hand, and usually results in #2. If you disregard your team, and you're arrogant, your code will likely be sloppy as hell. In my opinion that makes you the worst member of the team. I spoke with a coworker about this and we agreed that you just need to be humble as a software developer: we all are going to screw up, we don't all know all the answers, and we don't know why others in our teams say / know specific things, but we should not take their advise lightly it might of been a painful lesson for them to begin with!

flr03 8y ago
My girlfriend being a developer also we end up having this kind of conversation very often and we agreed to say the developers we enjoy the most to work with are knowledgeable but yet humble persons. In my opinions personality traits are often disregarded over technical skills during interviews.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  The best places to work for try to balance both.

harlanji 8y ago

Individuals often have little control over these things, and they are indicative of deeper cultural incentives. Without transgressing some, nothing will get done in many orgs. I see it a lot in big money VC backed startups, much less so in bootstrapped businesses. It’s important to be non-judgmental of people doing these things and simply leave or master Machiavellian moves to clear a path to promotion as other players are, eg. via optics or rallying support to oust “toxic” rivals for the good of the team.

selflesssieve 8y ago
Game theory suggests this is true. Dog eat dog. But do you think this is because incentives are misaligned, or do you think that even successful bootstrapped businesses, if around long enough, will fall victim to this culture?
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  >> will fall victim to this culture The issue with this culture is that using optics to achieve an advantage generally works, but is not a good long-term--big-picture strategy. So reasonably, of course you need to learn all of these quirks, just to be able to get rid of the vermin in your org.
  - selflesssieve 8y ago
    I agree if we decouple optics from genuine promotion in which an employee "manages upward" their true successes. I know that people are more nuanced than this and it's not black and white. So this will become quite tautological.
okaramian 8y ago
I agree. The system in place is to blame, and those people rose because they are just playing the game that is dealt to them. I'm not so good at the Machievellian political aspect, so I personally opt to leave when I notice behaviors like this are rewarded in the current system. I also wonder if I was able to rise in an organization that functions like this, if I would b the type of person to actually root out that toxicity in the first place.

chooseaname 8y ago

9. Refuse to do any maintenance and only work on new projects. 10. Hide your actual productivity. IE: get done with your coding tasks in half the time, leaving other devs have to fix all the bugs that QA kick back. (This is probably a managerial issue, actually, but perpetuated by devs who do # 9.)

rojobuffalo 8y ago
#9 for sure. Probably a side effect of being sloppy or writing bad code.
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  My version of #9 I'm dealing with is: Is this an feature that a customer will use? Or is it internal improvement? Yes to first, no to latter.
  - justwalt 8y ago
    Are you saying that your team hasn’t done enough of the latter, or that they don’t focus enough on the former?
    - NedIsakoff 8y ago
      We haven’t done enough of the latter. I’d love to automate and improve a lot of stuff but our project manager is pretty much always client visible first.
daxfohl 8y ago
Or, augmenting #9, the team lead who takes all the interesting work and doles out compliance etc to everyone else.
- anumberofopt 8y ago
  I really don't know how a team lead would find the time with all that turnover. Training is a bitch.

braythwayt 8y ago

There's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in myself at one time or another. I sometimes feel like I don't see anti-patterns as I go through my career, I fall over them and sprawl on the floor.

mont 8y ago
The important thing is that you can recognize your own problematic behavior, and actively work on fixing it. Nobody's perfect, but I imagine there's a reason the author put #1 as #1 ;)
- P_I_Staker 8y ago
  Yup, looking at common problematic behavior without reflecting inward, is an issue in and if itself. People often behave this way for a reason. You're liable to for the same reason.
bjourne 8y ago
I read the article and thought to myself that there's not a single thing in there that I don't recognize in my coworkers. :) Fwiw, I think articles like there are really bullshit. They just make self-doubting people doubt themselves even more and the real assholes never understands that the advice applies to them.
wool_gather 8y ago
There's a common quote about an expert being someone who has made every possible mistake in the domain at least once. So you may be on the right path!

jd75 8y ago

People love to work with me, but managers love all of those flaws.

tome 8y ago
Did you mean "People hate"?
- jd75 8y ago
  No, I mean I don't get promoted for trying to hear what other people say, while managers can't say enough nice things about the hipster-ass who breaks everything he touches trying to turn it into GraphQL no matter what. But I didn't write that very clearly the first time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

ataturk 8y ago

Refuse to write tests because they are "below you." I am finding out this is a cultural thing (national, not corporate).

denart2203 8y ago

It is not hard on practice :)

koboll 8y ago

Holy crap, is >gives cryptic names for variables, or at best not self-explanatory sure a big one. It's part of a category of small decisions that dramatically increase cognitive load when accumulated. Along with it: >Passing many arguments into functions with names that have no relevance to their role inside the function, so you constantly have to look up which argument maps to which function param >Needlessly reorganizing data structures or renaming variables so that it becomes more difficult to reason about the flow of data Naming things isn't just the hardest problem in programming, it's also the quickest way to piss off your peers if you're lazy about it.

vidanay 8y ago
A former primary developer of my code base had something wired backwards in his brain. The code is full of double negatives: if(!FeatureNotDisabled){ .... } It drives me absolutely bonkers!
- rabidrat 8y ago
  For me this often happens incrementally. Like they started with "if (FeatureNotDisabled)" and then locally refactored the code until it was "if (!FeatureNotDisabled)". The problem is that they then didn't go back for another pass before commit, and reverse the double-negative by changing the variable name and semantics. This could be due to laziness, ignorance (it works, what's the problem?), fear (it works now, let's not break it), or time mismanagement (it took long enough to get it working, no time to make everything "perfect").
  - vidanay 8y ago
    I could understand that evolution, but I have become convinced that this particular developer simply worked with negative logic in his brain. Even the configuration files will have: Feature1Disabled=False Feature2Disabled=True Feature3Disabled=False Instead of using feature flags to enable a feature, he used feature flags to disable features. He was very consistent and the logic is all correct, simply inverted.
- 8y ago

sonnyblarney 8y ago

'Arrogance' is more often than not mostly a matter of perception. Truly arrogant people can seem nice - so we generally don't want to ascribe negative qualities like 'arrogant' to them. 'Real arrogance', and even greed, backstabbing - those can also done by people who seem to be well liked. 'Perceptive arrogance' I think is mostly a matter of posture, demeanour and communication. If you smile, let other people talk, have an easygoing manner, and are agreeable, you will not be perceived as 'arrogant' even though you may have all of the qualities of a truly arrogant person. I don't think 'perceived arrogance' has anything to do with actually humility or gauge of one's own abilities, or of one's sense of self importance in the group. If you're terse, blunt, dour or gregarious ... it can be perceived as arrogant. 'Real arrogance' i.e. the notion that one's thoughts and ideals matter more than others etc. I think is not even correlated with posture and communication style. The most successful people in the corporate world are pure political players, and have never cared about outcomes, doing a good job - anything. All they care about is perception and their careers. But they are actually nice enough, generally charismatic. Actually caring caring about a product can simply cause contention, and possibly give the perception of arrogance. I prefer to consider arrogance in terms of measured behaviours, outcomes etc.. Glib political climbers to me are arrogant. Anyone actually trying to 'do a good job' and stepping on toes is just a bad communicator.

kakarot 8y ago

I thought I would make an addendum: > We all know at least one developer who ... will always insist on following “best practices” without understanding why those practices are considered “best” (there is no such thing as best practices that adapt to every team) For any developers out there recently starting on your path, I cannot stress the importance of taking the time to seek out best practices for new skills and technologies you pick up. Find all the "best practices" you can, then ignore some of them for a while with some pilot code, then try to follow a combination of the ones that make most sense to you. Compare the two modules for legibility, clarity, maintainability and conciseness. If, however, your team already has an entrenched way of doing things, don't be that jerk who comes to the party blasting their own music. Follow the existing style guides to a T and only offer advice for improvement after you've spent some time working with them. Even if you immediately recognize a glaring problem in the way things are done, no one is going to take you seriously and you'll just come across as arrogant unless you already have rapport as a perceptive and helpful team member. Take time to understand the culture around you, but don't, as this author suggests, ignore the tried and true devices of other cultures.

jlokier 8y ago
I agree. I'd like to add, in my experience some developers firmly (and sometimes loudly, judgementally) join a working environment and espouse best practices they've acquired from a cultural background they've worked in so far. Or read about, or watched a training course about. And they don't know (or care if) they are pushing things which are advertised as "best practice" in some domain or other, but aren't half as universally agreed upon as they think, and aren't half as effective or appropriate as they think in the new job. My point is: Some "best practices" aren't as universally agreed upon as people think, and people are often thinking in a bubble. If you're at a new job, and you see a glaring lack of what you've learned is "essential" best practice, I'd urge caution in assuming your new team are ignorant or that your managers are as clueless as you think at first, even if it looks messy and disorganised. Of course they might be clueless! But it takes time and deep questioning to be sure. Of course your experience should be brought into each new place you work. You're hired to bring in what you know, not just to fill a seat. By all means talk about your experience, about things you have actually done which worked well, and about what industry leaders are currently talking about. But if you feel the need to "teach" everyone straight away how to work better, give it time and consider the possibility that people might have given it considerable thought and experience of their own. They might even be familiar with much of what you're talking about, and rejected it or found a different approach. (Or they might not - that's to be discovered.) I say this because I've seen people turn up and, in effect, try to start fights long before they have spent the time to figure out (a) others in the team are quite experienced and familiar with the same practices but have decided on something else, (b) different industry bubbles actually do have different best practices for similar problems, and (c) they can't see some kinds of development strategy that are in use, because subtlety.

CodeSheikh 8y ago

From my experience at various companies, "technical managers" fit well into most of these categories. Because actively coding and managing a team of multiple developers can bring most of these issues out of you. Example: "getting away with your architectural decisions because you are presenting your ideas with a managerial authority and ignoring better solutions presented by other senior developers."

asabjorn 8y ago

> A team with a bad developer is way better off short one developer than it is with a bad element. How do you know that you just didn't communicate your issues well to the person? Is there a way to help them, you and your relationship improve so that you can be a stronger team? We all have blindspots and weaknesses, and weaknesses that fit together like puzzle-pieces tend to find each other until you resolve them. The half-moon is only an illusion, the whole moon is still there. You just don't see it, and you need the whole.

stronglikedan 8y ago
> How do you know that you just didn't communicate your issues well to the person? When you encounter that person, you'll know. Some people just aren't capable of grocking certain things. I had a guy on my team like this. He just wasn't getting it. At first, I would spend extra time with him, communicating the issue from every possible angle. He would almost always end up producing something so far off base. Everyone else on the team was sync'd but he just never got it. The best part is that he refused to believe that he was incompetent. I say "best", because that gave me an easy way to get him to move on without firing him. I knew if I wrote him up one time, his pride would kick in, and he would start looking for another job. The plan worked perfectly.

finaliteration 8y ago

I’ll add another one: Nitpicking constantly. I’ve worked with people who will fight and argue over every. Single. Detail. It drives me insane and usually makes me quit faster than anything else when I encounter those people.

whttheuuu 8y ago
This. There are 2 types of developers: those who enjoy philosophizing about programming minutiae and then there are those who enjoy shipping products.
- finaliteration 8y ago
  Don’t get me wrong. There are times when details should be discussed, but not when it’s coming out of some desire to engage in a power struggle and show everyone else how smart and in control you are.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  There's a subtype who ignores your review request for weeks but delivers a verbal drive-by nitpicking, as he's leaving work early, which focuses on trivial matters of opinion and ignores obvious bugs in functionality.
lawn 8y ago
Not just nitpicking either. It's enlarging a minimal problem to make it a major problem that must at all costs be solved.

Dzugaru 8y ago

> Developers can’t easily go back to where they were right > before an interruption. They need to get into the mindset > for development and then slowly trace back to where they > left off. And every fellow developer knows that. I used to think like that too, but after 10 years programming in many environments, now I'm inclined to disagree. If I cannot refocus immediately after interruption - I know I'm doing something wrong. Maybe the thing is too complex and must be cut down to smaller pieces, maybe I didn't keep enough notes or thinking through - anyhow nowadays I cannot work without a clear understanding of what simple piece of what complex piece I'm doing and where I've written down the other pieces I should do next.

hnbroseph 8y ago
> Maybe the thing is too complex and must be cut down to smaller pieces i suspect that for many, it's not necessarily their fault Thing is 'too complex' (though perhaps this is tangential); nor are they necessarily provided the opportunity, time or even permission to 'cut down to smaller pieces'. piles of work, looming deadlines and all that.
ianstallings 8y ago
One of the things I do to offset possible interruptions is to write things out or visualize them in some way. It helps me pick back up on the track I was interrupted from, but also has the added benefit of helping visualize the problem, which often leads to a greater understanding. It's a little bit of overhead that can pay off.
lolc 8y ago
To me that just sounds like you don't have tasks that require deep thought. And that you've developed habits to cope with interruptions, such as note-taking. To turn a complex thing into a list of simple things can be done by experience as well as by deep thought. But don't think you could get that experience in 5-minute chunks of thinking. To get the experience you need deep thought. Maybe set your sights higher if it's all easy to you? Or enjoy the fruits of experience, of course.
- 8y ago

scandox 8y ago

Here's a profile of a developer: - Easy going and pleasant. - Really interested in programming and tech in general - Talks intelligently about the problem at hand. Asks all the right questions. Agrees a plan of action in collaboration with colleagues. - Creates systems that definitely appear to work - Code looks pretty sane. Structure is right. Style seems good. - Always very responsive to problems. Jumps straight on them. - Every problem fixed another one seems to pop up. - Eventually you dig into the code and problem space in detail and you find that in a very subtle, even complex way the whole thing is completely wrong, the problem space misunderstood and everything patched over with little fixes to get things working for a particular case. In the end no system created by the person is useable without major remediation by another developer. Anyone experienced this?

maltesers 8y ago
Because they're fixing some other problem they want to work on. Not the problem they actually have. They know it.
mahemm 8y ago
Sounds like insufficient testing to me. This kind of deep/far reaching issue should have been crashing tests written before others would have seen it. Assuming that there is some testing in their work (if not; there's the answer), my guess would be that it's largely sanity testing of each functionality in a vaccuum. The coaching would probably be to demonstrate more integration-style testing, possibly using whatever tests caught system-level issues that the dev has pushed in the past.
- kyberias 8y ago
  No, it's just lack of true skill.
- potta_coffee 8y ago
  Could also be organizational. Constantly shifting whims of stakeholders, etc. Yes, requirements change but changing major requirements without a major refactor can cause these kinds of problems with the code. Or if the developer is being given unreasonable deadlines, no time/resources for testing, etc etc.

say-vagnes 8y ago

Good article. However, I'd like to talk about documentation and comments, as they were mentioned a lot. I think the industry should rely on them less. The trouble is, nobody updates every comment, and documentation is even more out of date. They cannot be automatically verified either. Getting worked up about it is just going to give you stress. Further, it is terribly subjective. Instead, advocate for the other good practices - variable names, clear separation of concerns, single responsibility, functional purity, etc. I have this inkling, actually, that the more comments there are in a function, the worse it is. Even high level overview comments, like some outlining an algorithm, could instead be high-level code, composing the various pieces together. It is very rare that a concept is actually nuanced in code. Instead, it is usually the implementation - and you can improve it. That said, it's a ton of work, and we have to ship a product at the end of the day. So here we are again, discussing tradeoffs in tech, and I think in these cases a comment block is an OK compromise. Just be cognizant that it IS a compromise.

blindwatchmaker 8y ago

Re: documenting code, I've gotten a lot of conflicting advice over the years, with some people insisting code should be documenting, and others insisting on docstrings.

timw4mail 8y ago
Best to have a balance, I think: For loosely typed dynamic languages, docblocks on interfaces (function/method definitions, interfaces, etc) are a good idea. For languages that require types in their interfaces, it is helpful for larger units(classes, functions, methods) to have a summary comment. Inline comments are still very useful for explaining how and why of implementation details. While I reject the stance that you should never have comments, I also see cases where better names and simpler logic can alleviate the need for more comments.

fromthestart 8y ago

>Most developers are enthusiastic people, but sometimes you may have the chance (or misfortune) to work with a negative one. Negativity is infectious Western society has a weird optimism bias. I think it goes hand in hand with extroversion bias, and it keeps many people from being genuine. >those developers are clearly at the top of Mount Stupid Frankly, that's insulting. Being a negative or critical person does not make one stupid, on the contrary, I would argue that the skepticism that comes with negativity is an asset for engineering. This advice is carte blanche to dismiss criticism.

say-vagnes 8y ago
Sometimes we need to remember that positive interactions make people happy, and negative ones make people sad. And that's what they'll remember about the interaction afterwards. For a lot of people, these basics apply even to technical discussions. Criticizing their code makes them feel bad, and so you are a jerk. Meanwhile, you think you are criticizing their design to help them improve it. This is a mistake on the part of the person receiving criticism, but it's very rare to have a manager or mentor who can point this out to them, and help them dissociate their implementations from their self worth. Couple into this other culture's aversions to even just saying "no", and we have a complex and challenging world to navigate. I'm constantly in search of the team where we don't have to do silly social dances to make sure everyone feels valued, and can just criticize and fix, since the members know they're valued by virtue of being part of the team to begin with. But that is asking a lot of people - they have to have reflected on these issues. Since this is rare, and the larger a team gets, the more likely you'll have to deal with those who haven't dissociated yet. Makes for a great mentorship opportunity if you can find a way to have them "let you in".
- jlokier 8y ago
  True enough, but it's not just about making anyone happy. Even thick-skinned people have a hard time with another type of negativity: "Negativity" doesn't only mean high quality criticism, or pessimism. It also refers to low quality, demanding, draining, and often competitive and repetitive discussions where critics are full of it. Sometimes there is also bullying, always talking over, making out that coworkers are stupid, taking credit for others work, not pulling their own weight, trying to trick people, manipulating people to their disadvantage, insinuations, word-twisting and game-playing, that sort of thing. That sort of negativity is draining. It's negative in an energy and morale sense. That's not about hurting anyone's feelings, and it's not even about sadness and happiness. It's just that some ongoing interactions drain everyone's energy without giving much back in exchange. Everyone does it occasionally. Some people do it a lot - those can destroy a team and a company.

stcredzero 8y ago

How everyone can be right, but everyone gets annoyed anyways. Cast: Developer A, a younger developer who is recognized company-wide as an expert in the latest features of blb++. Developer B, an older developer who maintains widely used legacy code in blb++ involved in about 80% of a billion dollar multinational's profits. Dev A: Your group should change the coding style in this application to the new standard. Dev B: Sure. But since we don't have good Unit Test coverage in this area, we shouldn't just go in and do it by hand. I need to guarantee correctness. I've done a change this big before using a syntax driven automated code rewrite tool, and one can guarantee correctness if the code structure allows it. If you know of such a tool for blb++, you can help me out and we can do it. (Background for the reader: No such tool exists for blb++ which can guarantee correctness. Such tools do exist for other languages in Dev B's work experience.) Later on, Dev A is grousing about how Dev B is just coming up with esoteric excuses to do nothing. She's kind of put off. Dev B is put off, because he's kind of been accused of making stuff up, even though he's talking from a particularly interesting and valuable part of his work experience. Dev A is correct, in that the new coding style is better, more efficient, and would even prevent mistakes going forwards. Dev B is correct, in that he really needs to guarantee correctness, especially if he's going to make a change that big which has no visible benefit to stakeholders. What's the takeaway?

mjsaah 8y ago
Uh, Dev A should take the time to understand Dev B's argument before writing it off as esoteric excuses.
ajdecon 8y ago
> What's the takeaway? "Unfortunately this tool doesn't exist for blb++, but we should still improve our coding style for this application. Is there another way to improve our correctness testing? If we allocate some time to improving unit testing, maybe we can do this refactor once we have X% coverage in these critical parts of the codebase." I.e., acknowledge that both goals are valid, and look for alternate solutions to make incremental progress towards both. Finding middle ground is unlikely to be satisfying from either viewpoint. In this example, Dev A isn't getting a quick win from fixing the coding style right away, and Dev B needs to allocate some time to improving testing. But especially when working on big teams and projects, this kind of piece-wise progress is where I've seen most things get done. This kind of solution might be pointed out by either Dev A or B, or they might need to bring in a fresh pair of eyes if they're both already frustrated. :)

cde-v 8y ago

This sounds more like how to make anyone hate to work with you.

john-radio 8y ago

This writer stole "Mount Stupid" from Zach Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) without crediting him! http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475

mnm1 8y ago

Love the article except for the part that encourages developers to rat on other developers. No. Unless another developer is so bad they are putting your job in jeopardy, let them be. It's the manager's job to sort that out and do something about it. Throwing other developers under the bus when ones own job security is not threatened should be the number one thing on this list of asshole things a developer can do by far. By very, very, very far.