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The problem here is less “Pat” and more the managers or systems which allow Pat to reach the point in his career where he believes he is a good developer. Some
by blunte 6y ago
The problem here is less “Pat” and more the managers or systems which allow Pat to reach the point in his career where he believes he is a good developer.
Some of Pat’s failings can be identified these days by code linters; and at least periodically if not in your CI on every push, listing should be done.
The usual problem is that the people deciding who to promote are not qualified or equipped to make sound judgements.
- Guthur 6y agoI'd go one step further and paraphrase some Deming and say that problem is both that Pat and the company are rating him against everyone else. There are so many confounding factors in an organisational system that to try and rate people against each other effectively is nigh on impossible. Also even if in some imaginary world you do manage to rate everyone against each other, guess what, half you people will be below average, that's statistics. And it could likely mean nothing to the effectiveness of your organisation. In Pat's case and most software engineering we should set up the processes to ensure that quality is maintained. Add automated checking and testing, code style guide, clear service boundaries and all that.
- blunte 6y agoThere's been talk in the past of having some levels of certification required to be called a software developer/engineer. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. To be a pilot, you have to at least jump through a lot of hurdles and formalities, and some of those will make you better. I think the world of corporate software development could use a few fundamental hurdles.
- InitialLastName 6y agoThe actual engineering professions have professional certifications that you have to attain to be allowed to do much of the (especially safety-critical) work of the profession [0] without supervision. [0] https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe
- Guthur 6y agoThe problem I feels is that we have no decent foundational standards and methodologies to build the software upon like we would a building or bridge. Civil and structural engineering have a lot of the basics abstracted away in to easily reusable knowledge that can be applied from one project to the next. Software engineering sometimes feels like we never managed to pull ourselves much further beyond a Leonardo Da Vinci drawing.
- Guthur 6y agoAlso, we are again defaulting to assume that Pat is the problem here. He's likely an average software engineer, and if not then we've done a terrible job at education, hiring, or promotion, which again is not necessarily his fault. The problem is the system, and certification would potentially resolve some aspects, but he still could be ranking himself incorrectly against other engineers and therefore we might be right back to square one.