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Ron, The Untouchable, Invincible, No-Good Developer

Adam Nathaniel Davis on November 28, 2020

[NOTE: This will be the first in a new series - Tales From The Dev Side - where I tell true stories from my career. No deep dives into specific te...
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Jen Miller • Edited

Haha,
I'm also at a bank as a lead and contractor...so I've seen some things.

Some managers/leads hate giving constructive criticism (or "bad reviews") on people so those developers go on with their career continuing bad habits. I've seen some people turn it around after a review...sometimes they just need to be told straight up about certain things and they work to fix it. One "Ron" I worked with came to me asking specifically for constructive criticism because he couldn't believe the manger only had good things to say about him.

With the proper feedback, team structure, etc, some developers like "Ron" can grow and improve. Hopefully your Ron is one of those. But...

I've also been on the receiving end of developer angst who hate constructive criticism and turn constructive feedback into a "all you accept are 10x developers" kind of drama.

After the CMS project went live, the bank offered me a salaried position as a Development Manager. For some stupid reason, I accepted.

:)

.. waiting for part 2

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

Feedback is always a touchy subject. When you mix feedback with developer egos, there's a distinct danger of it turning explosive.

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Patrick Kelly

Hah, so I'm not the only one who sees it. As an outsider who does this as a hobby, I regularly find myself... confused... by the behavior of many developers. There's certain behaviors and egos you see far more often in this field than in others.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

As a long time dev myself who does this for fun and for profit, it would be easy to assume that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool "developer advocate". But I know my colleagues. Hell, I even know myself. And I know that sometimes devs are not the most rational people in the world to deal with.

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Patrick Kelly

It reminds me of surgeons, actually. Only in medicine surgeons are a minority, and nurses tend to be good about giving attitude back to keep things in check. Where's the collaborative checks in development? From what I hear, designers, testers, documenters, etc, largely operate as entirely seperate groups.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

IMHO, the "checks" employed by most companies come down to minimizing the dev role. In other words, they tend to avoid any problems from the devs' attitudes by excluding the devs from as much of the app-design process as possible.

As you can imagine, this approach causes... other negative side effects.

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Patrick Kelly

I've been debating whether I want to work professionally in this field. Advancement in medicine has high costs, and I quite like programming. Been doing it as a hobby for fifteen years now. You've definitely given me a question I want to ask at interviews.

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Ricardo Luz

It's quite hard work with developers that are founding members, usually, they aren't the best technically, and even stupid things that they do are praised by the CEO/CTO, my way to solve this problem in one of the companies that I worked before was delegate less technical tasks to them like be the team scrum master or tests task.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

I couldn't agree with you more. But just to make sure that we're on the same page, I wanna make clear that when I talk about "older" programmers, I'm talking about far more people than just founding members.

There's a whole other post here. But I've found most founding members to be a complete PITA. Their legacy solutions are cobbled together and based upon whatever tech they learned 20 years ago. But if you say even the slightest thing to imply that the legacy solution is somehow less-than-perfect, they get needlessly defensive. In other words, their crappy solution becomes their "baby".

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Sean Allin Newell • Edited

Bahahahah! So funny you just gave 'em silly little tasks that he took forever to complete. You'd think it'd be a pretty big hint to oneself that it takes one 2-4x longer than everyone else to do smaller changes. 🤷‍♂️

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

Yeah - he was definitely blissfully aware of his "fit" within the team. If you gave him a text change that took him a week to implement, any everyone else had completed multiple features in that same week, it never really dawned on him that there was something "unbalanced" about that arrangement.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

Haha - glad you're enjoying the tale. I have no idea if he's still a "coder". I haven't seen him in several years, although I did hear a rumor that he was trying to launch a startup based on a laughably-bad premise.

As for whether-or-not he quit, that will absolutely be covered in the second half of the article! Stay tuned.

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Joseph Mawa

Of course, Raj had a stunning lack of situational awareness. And he showed no signs of jumping ship

Poor Raj. I can't wait for part 2.