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I'm sorry but the author misunderstood the situation: - He explained to the manager that a simple Hello World took a lot of time bla bla bla. The manager alrea

by GoToRO 7y ago

I'm sorry but the author misunderstood the situation: - He explained to the manager that a simple Hello World took a lot of time bla bla bla. The manager already knew this, that was his "achievement". He also took it personally as most people do, because when you tell him that something was bad, indirectly, you criticized his work (and so him) in the last years maybe. - The author tried to explain rationally the situation. The manager didn't want to hear it because he was already desperate. The manager knew that the end was close. A desperate man does not think rationally. All you can say is that you will fix it and then proceed as normal. They just want to hear that everything will be good even if you know it will not be. You are his psychologist/priest now. - The project had to failed. When you as a developer are in a situation when management is bad you should not do your best to save the project. The badly managed projects and companies must fail in order for the sane ones to survive. If you save a bad project/company you are the reason why there are some many bad jobs everywhere. Also this is the reason there is so much burnout in this industry.

commandlinefan 7y ago
Yep, exactly. One thing I’ve learned over my 30-year career as a programmer is: never argue. It’s a waste of not only your time, but your credibility. If they say it has to be done in a week, and it’s impossible to get it done in a week (like, actually impossible), you have two choices: disappoint them in a week, or argue, make them hate you, lose the arguments and disappoint them in a week anyway.
- GoToRO 7y ago
  More stuff needs to be written to teach well behaved people how to deal with all kind of toxic persons in the workplace.
nerdponx 7y ago
My question is: why didn't the author express all of this as soon as he realized it was a problem? One would hope that the author didn't spend several weeks in silent frustration! "Hey, all this template stuff is cool but it's going to take me a long time to sort through and understand. I'm going to need to ask a lot of questions about functions and logic. It would also be helpful if you could throw together some kind of quick and dirty documentation for X, Y, and Z classes which I already know are going to be important and it will be much faster and easier for you to write that (15 min) than for me to reverse engineer your thinking (15 hours)."
- GoToRO 7y ago
  From my experience, in those type of situations, nobody is actually listening. Also there is no experienced person there to explain the project and... there is so much technical debt that no one can do anything about it.

by GoToRO 7y ago

commandlinefan 7y ago

Yep, exactly. One thing I’ve learned over my 30-year career as a programmer is: never argue. It’s a waste of not only your time, but your credibility. If they say it has to be done in a week, and it’s impossible to get it done in a week (like, actually impossible), you have two choices: disappoint them in a week, or argue, make them hate you, lose the arguments and disappoint them in a week anyway.

GoToRO 7y ago
More stuff needs to be written to teach well behaved people how to deal with all kind of toxic persons in the workplace.

nerdponx 7y ago

My question is: why didn't the author express all of this as soon as he realized it was a problem? One would hope that the author didn't spend several weeks in silent frustration! "Hey, all this template stuff is cool but it's going to take me a long time to sort through and understand. I'm going to need to ask a lot of questions about functions and logic. It would also be helpful if you could throw together some kind of quick and dirty documentation for X, Y, and Z classes which I already know are going to be important and it will be much faster and easier for you to write that (15 min) than for me to reverse engineer your thinking (15 hours)."

GoToRO 7y ago
From my experience, in those type of situations, nobody is actually listening. Also there is no experienced person there to explain the project and... there is so much technical debt that no one can do anything about it.