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Discussion on: I am a mediocre developer

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Shawn Sommer

I've always been the same way regarding trust. It seems the minute I trust that something will work as it is supposed to, it doesn't.

Dovetailing with this idea, my first boss often complained that things took "longer than they should" when I worked on them. But then when it came time to discuss my performance for the year I would be pretty much with everyone else in terms of completed items. What he was initially missing was not only that I would dig to ferret out the real problems rather than treat a symptom but I would also go over it a few times and think about edge cases, etc... That made it rare for a ticket to come back to me after I had completed it where many of the other "faster" devs would end up revisiting the same ticket 5 or 6 times because they were trying to work fast. Sometimes we would joke when a dev would hit a rough patch where it seemed nothing they did was passing QA calling the offender "Captain Rework".

Also, we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking "a user would never do that". We had an end user that would literally wait for an update to come out and then he would actively try to break it. We'd literally get tickets where he'd say something like "I put 55 question marks in this field and tried to submit the form, my browser became unresponsive and crashed. When I put in 54 or less it works fine, please fix." I mean really, who does that? lol