Bad Programming

12 Feb 2007

Bad programming is one of those things that really drives me nuts. I don’t mind when someone who doesn’t know how to program, and understands that they don’t know how to program, writes bad code. They’re learning. I can help them.

The real problem is when you’re working with a group of people and they all feel that they are great programmers and they understand perfectly what they are doing, when really they don’t.

The real problem I have with those people is that they are unable to accept that they don’t know what they are doing, and are not only unwilling to fix what they have done wrong, but most likely unable to as well. Of course, this means that I end up having to fix their problems.

Refactoring code can be fun. Fixing stupidity on the other had, rarely is.

Then, you pile on top of all of this the fact that because of how they have written their code, there is no way to easily fix it without rewriting the entire system and so you tend to end up with a hack (of course you promise yourself that you will fix it in preproduction next year, or when you have some down time, but that never happens).

The final straw, is that I sit here all day trying to get my work done, but generally fixing someone else’s. I’m here to answer questions. I’m more than willing to help people out. However, the questions don’t come and the people don’t ask. Because these questions are never asked, I end up working more and more.

Is it too much to ask for to work with a few smart, humble, people?

I had this at the start of my career in the middle of nowhere Nova Scotia. Everyone did their job. Everyone was open to criticism. If there was a problem, everyone checked their work first instead of telling everyone else that something broke and they need to fix it. As much as I didn’t like the overtime, or in some aspects the work atmosphere very much, that was hands down the best crew of programmers that I have ever worked with. I would be willing to pit the team of 11 programmers that I lead there against any other team of 25+ programmers I have ever worked on since. Without any doubt in my mind, that group of 11 would blow away that team of 25+.

I guess, in hockey terms, that team is the championship Oilers team from the 80’s. It was a collection of underappreciated and underpaid super stars who played for the love of the game. It was a team that played in an era with no clutching and grabbing, the game just flowed (there were many, MANY, fewer managers and levels of communication to go through). It was a team that got things done.