8 ms·
I think one of the main values of senior developers is they've seen a few cycles. If something has been tried four times before and failed there's a pretty goo
by rmason 6y ago
I think one of the main values of senior developers is they've seen a few cycles. If something has been tried four times before and failed there's a pretty good chance that it will fail the fifth time. But if the boss has only seen it fail once he's going to try again, then when it fails get mad at you. He will be mad because of your calling it out in advance he will feel you're undermining his authority whether or not that's your intention.
Had a friend tell me when he was a newly minted lieutenant. All the new guys were put in a competition with their platoon to build a temporary bridge across a river. While all the others called out orders he consulted the grizzled old Sarge and asked him what he recommended. He took his advice and said lets proceed. Instead of barking orders he spent time working alongside his men doing physical labor. His team not only won they set a record for that task. As a result his platoon would walk through a wall for him.
But what if there isn't an old experienced Sarge? The organization is the worse for it and I've seen it time and time again.
- blablabla123 6y agoBoth are really needed, especially when there is a lot of complexity. It's no fun to work buggy code that is buggy because lots of best practices were ignored/there is too much experimental stuff there at once. There is also a need for (usually young) people who doubt existing wisdom and try impossible things to find out they suddenly work.
- Retric 6y agoLack of development time and or skill is more likely to result in a buggy mess than failure to uphold best practices. What’s confusing the issue is skilled people given sufficient time and support generally use best practices. The best example I can give is one developer given very little time sends something to QA their unsure about. QA lets it though because they stopped testing his code.
- bregma 6y agoThere is no old grizzled sarge because either the resume gets canned because it shows a university graduation date from last century, or because someone with a greying neckbeard and 40 years successful on-the-job experience can't be bothered spending a day doing pointless whiteboard exercises to prove he knows something that will never be used and is not applicable to anything but pointless whiteboard exercises.
- user5994461 6y agoThere is no old grizzled sarge because personal computers have been out for less than 20 years.
- confidantlake 6y agoPCs came out in the early 2000s?
- user5994461 6y agoSounds about right. Could say late 1990s if you were in the right location in an affluent family.
- analog31 6y agoI started college in 1982, majoring in math and physics. The professors all had personal computers on their desks. I bought myself one for under $1000 the next year. By the time I graduated, even the computer science professors were using personal computers, though student assignments were still done on the mainframe.
- user5994461 6y agoWhere were you living?
- analog31 6y agoI grew up in Michigan and went to one of the many small liberal arts colleges in the state.
- acdha 6y agoYou’re off by a couple of decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers You could be thinking of “personal computer with Internet access”? That’s closer timing as long as you want something more open / capable than the various dialup services which were popular with personal computer users starting in the 1980s.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago>He will be mad because of your calling it out in advance he will feel you're undermining his authority whether or not that's your intention. This is where communication skills come in. The more one levels up their communication skills the easier situations like this are to overcome.