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how about the negative 1x or negative 10x developers. you soak up tons of time of other developers' mentoring time while never "learning how to fish". you can'

how about the negative 1x or negative 10x developers. you soak up tons of time of other developers' mentoring time while never "learning how to fish". you can't figure out how to solve problems so you're always stuck. you choose the wrong path of investigation and waste weeks on the wrong line. you won't post your code for review until it's "ready" so no one's ever sure really how to help you or your progress. people complain about you to managers but nothing is done. you get good reviews. you earn as much as your colleagues.

koonsolo 4y ago
That definitely exists too. But I guess they already have some chance of getting fired.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I actually think they get promoted for shipping something exceedingly complex and challenging that still barely works. It doesn't matter if a much simpler, robust solution was passed over.
- hnfong 4y ago
  There are costs to firing people (morale, hiring overhead, other risks etc) so often they are kept around for a couple years on the hope that they will somehow improve. 0.1 devs are actually fine, they don’t really exist unless they stare at YouTube for 36 hours each week. Usually when incompetent devs start to do something the result turns negative quite quickly.
tester756 4y ago
guesses problems reasons instead of try to debug I worked with person who told his/her manager that "they [mozilla] decreased stack size in firefox[0] and that's why app doesn't work because there was a lot of recursive calls under the hood cuz they used knockout.js or something like that" the actual reason was some null or some other trivial thing [0] I checked that later and they even increased it in last versions.
shagie 4y ago
That's the Net Negative Producing Programmer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf
pnutjam 4y ago
Or, you build complex structures to perform automation, but never finish them. You spend alot of time and energy maintaining the house of cards and finishing the non-automated parts without letting others know what you're doing. You move on and the house of cards all falls down. <Been in the cleanup phase of this multiple times>
zigzag312 4y ago
or you rewrite something that worked fine, with buggy half-backed implementation that uses some new overhyped library/language :)

koonsolo 4y ago

That definitely exists too. But I guess they already have some chance of getting fired.

karmakaze 4y ago
I actually think they get promoted for shipping something exceedingly complex and challenging that still barely works. It doesn't matter if a much simpler, robust solution was passed over.
hnfong 4y ago
There are costs to firing people (morale, hiring overhead, other risks etc) so often they are kept around for a couple years on the hope that they will somehow improve. 0.1 devs are actually fine, they don’t really exist unless they stare at YouTube for 36 hours each week. Usually when incompetent devs start to do something the result turns negative quite quickly.

tester756 4y ago

guesses problems reasons instead of try to debug I worked with person who told his/her manager that "they [mozilla] decreased stack size in firefox[0] and that's why app doesn't work because there was a lot of recursive calls under the hood cuz they used knockout.js or something like that" the actual reason was some null or some other trivial thing [0] I checked that later and they even increased it in last versions.

shagie 4y ago

That's the Net Negative Producing Programmer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf

pnutjam 4y ago

Or, you build complex structures to perform automation, but never finish them. You spend alot of time and energy maintaining the house of cards and finishing the non-automated parts without letting others know what you're doing. You move on and the house of cards all falls down. <Been in the cleanup phase of this multiple times>

zigzag312 4y ago

or you rewrite something that worked fine, with buggy half-backed implementation that uses some new overhyped library/language :)