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The Incompetent Developer - Do you know one?

Chris Bertrand on December 04, 2018

One of the most interesting parts of software development, are the group dynamics that form to complete the task at hand. This congregation of ind...
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Ben Sinclair • Edited

These individuals are not stupid, they are highly educated people that may have been in the industry for a long time.

I'm not sure you can justify a blanket statement like this. I've known people in programming jobs where I wondered how they managed to cope with tasks such as buying their own groceries without catching fire.

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kurisutofu

I agree.

Case in point, I knew of a PHD specialized in A.I who had to finalize a website I almost finished before I was sent to another client.
I know A.I. and website building may require different mindsets but when I was called back on the project to check why suddenly everything was broken, I checked and talked to the guy.

It became apparent that he had:

  • Tested new features he wanted to implement (before he even started on the required ones) directly on the prod site
  • Renamed all the variables so it's easier to read. So he renamed them something like a, aa, aaa, aaa etc ... until he reached a limit of character or something where then he went to b, bb, bbb, bbbb etc ...
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Chris Bertrand • Edited

Yeah, you're right. They might just be stupid! 😉

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Frankie Barrios

I'm still a student but I've experienced tons of interaction with "incompetent cs students". Great article!

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Chris Bertrand

Thanks, incompetence can be fixed... In time.... Hopefully

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smuschel

Ha! In reply to my comment you said incompetence can't be fixed. You're an incompetent commenter! Now... how do I add a smiley to this thing? Oh well...

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Chris Bertrand • Edited

Wait a second... You're right, I am incompetently incompetent! 🤯

Tbf incompetence whilst still a student is most likely naivety and lack of knowledge rather than full blown unfathomable incompetence.

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smuschel

All you young folks know how to Do smileys. Now I feel incompetent and old.

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Chris Bertrand

Incompetent definitely, old potentially! 😏

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Da2@ciri3dg

Such an interesting question. We all are a certain level of incompetence.. we are all promoted until we reach an UNacceptable level...

The question leads to other more interesting discussion..

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Chris Bertrand

It really does...

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Da2@ciri3dg

It's a very abstract query. Incompetence is a subjective judgement. We have to establish some kind of standard. Who are we to make judgement? What have we accomplished to become judges?

Let's look at ourselves first...

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Da2@ciri3dg

Trump inherited his wealth! Who is he to judge others?

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Da2@ciri3dg

If that's the basis of our forum, maybe we should start with a another perspective

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Erwan ROUSSEL

Yes I am

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Anna Simoroshka

Same

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Chris Bertrand

It's more common that you would think! 😂

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Chris Bertrand

I might be too! 😇

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Alexis López

We ourselves do not know our own level of incompetence!

This sounds like the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Chris Bertrand

That's exactly it, do you mind if I add that in?

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Alexis López

Not at all, go ahead!

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smuschel • Edited

A problem I often see is that devs don't have enough time to learn new things or improve the skills they have. There's lots of reasons for that (reduced size of dev Team, too much todos, the wish to have a life outside of IT). Plus it's Hard to learn stuff without being able to use it regularly. But then again, some people are just plain incompetent...

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Chris Bertrand

Haha, exactly. Incompetence is something that just can't be fixed.

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AxelleDRouge • Edited

I recently had to work on a project that was really badly written.
Just for info, I may have developed a fear of the 'infinited splits of death'
one string was repeatedly splited (with .split('!')[0].split('&')[1].split() ...) without any thoughts about objects, variables or all those things that make sense when coding (even just for our piece of mind)
And it was only a small part of the problems of this work. From full React librairies copy pasted from the debugger tool of chrome in the code (a full file of 600kb, where only a tiny part is really relevant) to multiples lines of console.log containing http request in large quantities in production and the complete opposite of any DRY logic...
It was just a nightmare to work with!
So I don't really fully blame that person for her incompetence, more the recruiters and the project management for assigning her on that project, important with security aspects.
But she should at least have been more curious, more logical, or more inclined to search for answers when she didn't know what to do. She didn't do that, and noone was present to guide her. By the time I arrived, she use a vertical screen to code in js (I mean, seriously?) And now I have to work with the results, and spend more hours of work on correcting everything!
At least it is a good teaching method for me, I understand that much more the necessities of a clean code, with precise names for variables and functions, with short functions easy to associate and debug

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Jayson Smith

Quick heads up, I think you might have meant comprise instead of compromise in the beginning of your piece?

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Chris Bertrand

I sure did, thanks for spotting and highlighting my incompetence. I've fixed it now

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Vico

can you give solutions about this problem?

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Chris Bertrand

I can try, what's this problem?

The first step to recovery is Acceptance! 😁