Transcription
Seven signs of a bad programmer. How many do you think I'm gonna get? Real talk. Type right up here. How many of those do you think I'm going to have? One, two, seven. Okay, well, I'm happy that all of you guys think I'm an uh, and then I'm stupid. Really, what this shows is that I'm emotionally bruised all the time. Streaming the seven signs of a bad programmer. Uh, the secret developer. Okay, four-minute read. Let's go. Let's go.
There are many ways to be effective or ineffective at a job. Here are a few that seem to be, uh, the running theme with some programmers I've worked with over the years. Number one, you watch a lot of Twitch, specifically the Primogen. Uh, let's see, I'm a software engineer, not a programmer. Okay, okay, okay. You know what they are like? Mechanical keyboard in the office. Can't make stand-up because they're thinking about a problem. It's a five minutes to mention, uh, what you're thinking about. How long did this? Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. This, yes, yes. Conflating the person with the mechanical keyboard, the person that thinks that, you know, that gets lost in a problem. This is so good. Oh no, oh no.
First off, stand-ups are never five minutes. It's because, it's because Bill won't shut up about his dog. Well, actually, this weekend, me and the misses were on a hike and you'll never guess what little Teddy did. So Teddy ran off at the sight of a cow and then we were off in the pasture. It's just like, dude, I don't care about your dog, your hike, or anything. I just want to get the hell out of this meeting. If we're having lunch, tell me about it, okay? Because lunch is where we talk about this stupid. Not at stand-up. What are you doing? What did you do? Tell me your effing roadblocks and get the hell out of the way. Why are stand-ups so bad, by the way? I haven't done a stand-up in about 10 years since joining Netflix. It's been fantastic. F stand-ups. I'm not entirely certain how people, uh, can be become so arrogant with three years of experience, but there you go. Whoa, this article is a FL. This article is barbecuing somebody. Yo, if you have a mechanical keyboard at the office, I don't think it necessarily means you're arrogant, but man, that barbecue is set to 500.
I like to impress with my job title. Who? What do you mean? Nobody cares. Whiteboard in the background. Some people in the industry do have degrees. I've worked with doctors, not medical kind. Okay, usually we call those PhDs. Uh, those with qualifications in the industry often choose not to mention them because within many organizations, there is a reverse establishment around education. Okay, that's fair. There's kind of, I've seen some of this reverse novelness, um, but it's, it's exceptionally rare and it mostly exists on Twitter. I don't think I've seen it anywhere else. Uh, yet others wear glasses without medical reasons, which really happens instead of in front of a whiteboard on those video calls. Is he describing LinkedIn or programmers? This seems like a LinkedIn call out. You know that one post that inevitably gets around on Twitter from time to time that's just like, "I watch porn. I don't care who knows." It's on LinkedIn. You're like, dude, this guy's unhinged. I'd be more impressed if your whiteboard had, uh, more than a bullet point list. That is, I know you don't understand the wider architecture of the application. Your whiteboard is like putting makeup on a pig. Damn zing zing.
All right, here we go. Uh, some have interesting information written on the whiteboard, though. What the hell are you doing reading a whiteboard? Shut up. Why are you caring? Stop caring. All right, here we go. Delete the current project. You've entered a new project. And I've seen someone on Twitter recommend that you delete the whole thing and start again. Won't the current team members be somewhat put out of, uh, joint by the suggestion? What do you mean, teamwork might be damaged? Just delete it. Okay, whatever. Uh, I mean, a full-on rewrite. There are sometimes benefits to it, but the problem is, is it so, so I mean, the problem with this article right away is that it lacks depth in general. It's very funny, ad hominem. We're all laughing, hahaha, but the reality is, is that there's a lot of ad hominem in here with not a lot of depth. Um, the thing is, is that some technologies you choose make it virtually impossible to just do a runtime refactor, if you will, right? Uh, it's really, really hard, right? So like, I mean, real talk, if you choose to write your front end in any framework, Svelte, JavaScript, wait, not JavaScript, Svelte, React, Solid.js, you can't just swap them, right? You can't just do that. It takes a lot. You know what I mean? Like, you can't, you literally have to delete the whole effing thing and start again, right? Uh, but okay.
Uh, the Michael Jackson "Black or White." The programmer can only think in terms of right and wrong rather than shades of gray. In almost every circumstance, there's only shades of gray and no right or wrong decisions, apart from a few things. Let's not get, uh, confused, though. When programmers declare that something should just be done in a certain way, they frequently think about their way of doing things. So what you're trying to say is that there is a way that things should be done, but it's not the way that someone else is suggesting? Do you feel the loopback on this own piece of advice? Yo, bro, you can't make general statements. So you're doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. Like what, uh, what, uh, it's a loop. Sometimes it doesn't need to be your way, uh, or the highway. Perhaps introduce the, uh, perhaps introduce that it depends, a way of thinking, to your software development practices. This is good, but also real talk. Who here, press one in the chat. Who here has been on a team of a bunch of "it depends" CIS deal and absolutes? Ideal and absolutes. Press one. When you bet on a bunch of "it depends," how fun is that team, right? How fun is the team that everybody wants to pedant, like everybody builds their own bike shed constantly? Like it's, there's, it's almost equally as bad. I preferred the informed captain approach, which is just have one person. We all go, "Hey, hey, Peter, what do we do?" And Peter goes, "Okay, I think we should do this, this, and this." And we go, "Okay, we'll do that." Peter. We call it at Netflix, we call it the informed captain. Someone just needs to make a decision. We need to just, we just need to move on, right? Just stop, stop with all this, this pedantic masturbation.
Uh, the Peter Principle. Oh man, this sounds like Pete's favorite thing. Faster path downwards. Some programmers are well worth a promotion after 12 or even six months. Yet it seems many programmers feel that they are entitled to a raise and a new job title after a few months on the job. The, the standard of team leads in tech companies does seem pitifully low. New developers quickly move up the chain without technical knowledge for a new, uh, for a new advanced role, and certainly lack the people knowledge in order to be an effective team lead. Programming is all about people. They take time to develop. Why is it called the Peter Principle? Is this a reference to Peter, the pillar of the church? What, what's? I don't. Is this a Peter I'm supposed to know? Is it a biblical reference? Peter Griffin? Did he mean the word penis? What is it? I think it's Spider-Man because Spider-Man wasn't he got promoted too quick and he wasn't ready for his responsibility and his uncle got killed? I think that's what it means. Okay, if I can relate everything to Spider-Man. I'm going to. Not biblical. Clearly, I just copy the code from Stack Overflow. It seems to work. Let's go. Later that week, "Can you fix the crash?" You guessed it. Okay, I mean, this is such an old meme. I don't know anybody that actually does this, right? Chat, you don't do this, right, chat?
Okay, so this one actually sounds great. Lack of curiosity. It's fine to be in, uh, in it for the money. Absolutely. To some extent, every job is about the income you derive from it. Absolutely. If Netflix cut my income in tenth, by a tenth, like if they cut it into one tenth, I'm not like, "Well, geez, I really love my job." You know? Like, I get it. There is definitely an income barrier here. However, to really have a passion and love, uh, your work means that you get so much more out of it and become a much more valued colleague. Absolutely. Your aim is to retire at 40. Not so much, perhaps. That is why you are not so interested in, uh, to find out the origin of that bug. After all, what happens if you are curious and you just don't want to work at a corporation by the time you're 40? I'm not, hey, I'm boss, if you're listening, I'm not, I'm not trying to say I'm going to quit Netflix within the next four years, but I'm just saying that it would be really sweet if I didn't have to work for you at 40. I got them. Damn, I'm about to be a farmer full-time. But why? If you don't enjoy your job and want to improve both yourself and your current project, perhaps it's time to find a new career. Uh, oh my goodness. This little, little of debts, little intense. I can, you know what? Not everybody has to love, love it. I, I finally come around on it. Not everybody has to love it. You just have to realize what that means. That is it. If you don't love it and you're just cashing in, cashing out, you're gonna be a kind of a stagnant, basic generalist with not a lot of depth. And there's plenty of jobs that need that, right? There's plenty of jobs that like that, plenty of jobs that need it. That's okay. Not everybody has to be around. Not everyone has to be an Olympian, right?
Uh, this article is a light-hearted look at the following destructive developer behaviors. Okay, I'm a software engineer, not a programmer. Whiteboard in the background. To delete the current project. Michael Jackson "Black or White." Peter Principle. Still don't know who this Peter is. Copy pasta. Lack of curiosity. Conclusion: If you're displaying one of these signs, it doesn't mean that you're a bad programmer. Just playing all seven, you might not be a fantastic developer. Uh, you might not be the fantastic developer you think you are. I, let's see. I don't know, though, because I don't know. You see, you want to know an effective programmer looks like? Look at the article below. Seven signs of a great programmer. Office space. Peter. Ooh, none of us even thought about that. Okay, hold on. Uh, oh, thank you. Thank you. Uh, uh, Twitch Jeopardy. The Peter Principle was laid out by Canadian educational scholar and sociologist Dr. Lawrence J. Peter in his 1968 book titled The Peter Principle. Kind of looks like a dick. Dang it. This is a YouTube video. The Peter Principle is the concept in management developed by Lawrence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to to rise or tend to rise to a level of respect, uh, respective incompetence. Employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level in which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. And that's actually a pretty good principle. That's actually a pretty good principle. I like that.
So you tell me I can't make a dick joke? That's what you're trying to say? Well, Karen, then how do I measure my dick in bytes if that's such a big deal to you, huh? Do you know about the pickling algorithm? Oh, you don't? Well, guess what? It's confusing. The name Karen is the dictogen.