4 ms·
A lot of this is hyperbolic whining. Back when I worked for other people, I had the luxury (not a luxury) of being the mediator between the evil gremlin code r
by debacle 3y ago
A lot of this is hyperbolic whining.
Back when I worked for other people, I had the luxury (not a luxury) of being the mediator between the evil gremlin code reviewer and the wayward antihero programmers. Takeaways:
1. The evil gremlin code reviewer was almost always right, and was almost unequivocally the smartest programmer at the company.
2. Our antihero programmers not only tended to be wrong, they tended to be blatantly wrong in a way that worked on their machine, or worked for specific uses cases, but would never work in production.
3. The evil gremlin code reviewer was an asshole, liked being an asshole, and didn't care how many people thought he was an asshole.
4. The antihero programmers refused to learn how to be better programmers from the evil gremlin code reviewer, and the evil gremlin programmer refused to learn how to be educative, rather than castrative, in his code reviews.
5. Rather than serving as a quality enforcing function, most code reviews were spiked by the accounts team, meaning that evil gremlin code reviewer was in a perpetual state of frustration, antihero programmers were constantly in a cycle of post-production bug fixing/optimization, and the pace of development invariably ground to a halt over time.
6. No one cared how little I cared about this problem, but it was a nice excuse to not have to talk to the accounts team, and so I spent a lot of time listening to people whine.
- bretthardin 3y agoEverything is a people problem - even code review. SWE who choose to not grow (by refusing to learn) are going to create awful culture.
- candiddevmike 3y agoFire the gremlin, it's never worth picking an IC over the team morale. Folks can learn to be better programmers, assholes will always be assholes.
- atq2119 3y agoThe problem with this advice is that, at least in this story, if we're taking it at face value, the antihero programmers didn't learn.
- candiddevmike 3y agoI read it as weren't given the opportunity to learn, and didn't a have a mentor to teach them.
- debacle 3y agoIf they wanted a mentor it was one part wet nurse and one part Mr. Rogers. There were no adults in the room.