3 ms·

It tends to be easier to fix bugs that you caused yourself. You see something blow up and you can think "yea, that's because I did thing X in Y to achieve Z".

by jiggy2011 13y ago

It tends to be easier to fix bugs that you caused yourself. You see something blow up and you can think "yea, that's because I did thing X in Y to achieve Z". So it's possible that the other programmers are actually just causing more bugs than this person, jumping in to band aid a fix and maybe causing another bug in the process. This sort of whack-a-mole looks very productive on a bug tracker.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
The manager in this case seems like a flake; using a stupid metric to justify a pre-determined review score (stackrank scores are usually based on perception, not reality) rather than coming up with some better fiction.
klibertp 13y ago
Yeah, reading this question I started to feel anxious about my own employment. I am almost afraid to go to work on Monday. We have quite large code base and my colleague and I are the only people developing it - and all the original devs left long time ago. I spent last three weeks chasing down a very peculiar race condition, which in theory couldn't happen. Finally I discovered a bug, mostly by accident, in one of the in-house libraries the project uses. It was unexpected to say the least, because I was told many times over that "the library code is ok, check your own". It took me another week to fix the bug, because it was really complex and even "less my own" than the code of the actual project. In the same time my colleague fixed a multitude of bugs (mostly in our, "fresh" code) and implemented three new features. Which means I should get fired... Hopefully, I won't - our boss is a technical person, a programmer with many years of experience, and I believe he will be just happy that the bug finally went away. But, you know - what if he retires? What if I find myself managed by someone who doesn't know the difference between wading through thousands of lines of code and years of accumulated cruft, deprecated apis and inaccurate or completely missing comments? I think the OP should - he did this already, as he wrote in the second update to the post - just find a new, better job. The environment and management which only watched him struggle in silence and then fired him make no good place to work.
- WA 13y ago
  You should do two things: 1. Get more tickets that show progress and work on both. The hard one that takes you a week and some filler-nonsense that makes you look good in terms of progress and number of tickets closed. 2. Play the ball back to the manager and discuss the in-house-library problem with him. Make it a problem for him that he needs to solve. It clearly is anyway, because you got a broken in-house library and were told that it is fine. It wasn't, thus, management problem. Tell him that you found the bug and solved it and that you wonder how many hours other developers wasted on a bug like that before, but now it's gone (communicate that you provided value by reducing maintenance cost in the long term and that other developers probably struggled with the same problem and didn't solve it). Then ask him how both of you should deal with situations like that in the future. Apparently, if you were told that the library is fine but it isn't, you can't complete your tickets on time. Ask him how he wants you to communicate problems like that the next time this happens and how he can allocate more resources to you if it happens. The idea is to make the manager perceive you as someone, who is eager to solve problems, but needs a reliable working environment. Make the manager responsible for setting up this environment. This way, you communicate strength, because you are not that dumbass slow developer who accepts everything as is, but someone who proactively creates a sane working environment. Notes: If your manager is nuts, it won't work. If it was a minor problem, do not make a big problem out of it but still mention it. Since it took you a week, it doesn't seem to be a minor problem though.
- jbjohns 13y ago
  If you're so fearful of your job you should quit right away. It's not healthy to live like that.
  - klibertp 13y ago
    That was a bit of sarcasm. Sorry I didn't make it clearer.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

The manager in this case seems like a flake; using a stupid metric to justify a pre-determined review score (stackrank scores are usually based on perception, not reality) rather than coming up with some better fiction.

klibertp 13y ago

Yeah, reading this question I started to feel anxious about my own employment. I am almost afraid to go to work on Monday. We have quite large code base and my colleague and I are the only people developing it - and all the original devs left long time ago. I spent last three weeks chasing down a very peculiar race condition, which in theory couldn't happen. Finally I discovered a bug, mostly by accident, in one of the in-house libraries the project uses. It was unexpected to say the least, because I was told many times over that "the library code is ok, check your own". It took me another week to fix the bug, because it was really complex and even "less my own" than the code of the actual project. In the same time my colleague fixed a multitude of bugs (mostly in our, "fresh" code) and implemented three new features. Which means I should get fired... Hopefully, I won't - our boss is a technical person, a programmer with many years of experience, and I believe he will be just happy that the bug finally went away. But, you know - what if he retires? What if I find myself managed by someone who doesn't know the difference between wading through thousands of lines of code and years of accumulated cruft, deprecated apis and inaccurate or completely missing comments? I think the OP should - he did this already, as he wrote in the second update to the post - just find a new, better job. The environment and management which only watched him struggle in silence and then fired him make no good place to work.

WA 13y ago
You should do two things: 1. Get more tickets that show progress and work on both. The hard one that takes you a week and some filler-nonsense that makes you look good in terms of progress and number of tickets closed. 2. Play the ball back to the manager and discuss the in-house-library problem with him. Make it a problem for him that he needs to solve. It clearly is anyway, because you got a broken in-house library and were told that it is fine. It wasn't, thus, management problem. Tell him that you found the bug and solved it and that you wonder how many hours other developers wasted on a bug like that before, but now it's gone (communicate that you provided value by reducing maintenance cost in the long term and that other developers probably struggled with the same problem and didn't solve it). Then ask him how both of you should deal with situations like that in the future. Apparently, if you were told that the library is fine but it isn't, you can't complete your tickets on time. Ask him how he wants you to communicate problems like that the next time this happens and how he can allocate more resources to you if it happens. The idea is to make the manager perceive you as someone, who is eager to solve problems, but needs a reliable working environment. Make the manager responsible for setting up this environment. This way, you communicate strength, because you are not that dumbass slow developer who accepts everything as is, but someone who proactively creates a sane working environment. Notes: If your manager is nuts, it won't work. If it was a minor problem, do not make a big problem out of it but still mention it. Since it took you a week, it doesn't seem to be a minor problem though.
jbjohns 13y ago
If you're so fearful of your job you should quit right away. It's not healthy to live like that.
- klibertp 13y ago
  That was a bit of sarcasm. Sorry I didn't make it clearer.