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Comment by vigilant | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a lack of emphasis on 'shipping working software' in this list. As a developer, that is what I ultimately want to be judged on. Nothing else. And too many managers judge developers by how closely they adhere to their silver bullet development process which they read in a random website.

It seems like the only ways to do this are

1) Create a startup, ship something awesome, have a great exit 2) Work for wall street, in a position where your success is judged by how much money you make, which directly drives your bonus.

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>There seems to be a lack of emphasis on 'shipping working software' in this list. As a developer, that is what I ultimately want to be judged on.

I'm not sure I do. Shipping software in a mess of technical debt is much slower than greenfield development or development on a well architected product.

I'd ultimately want to be judged by an architect who reads all pull requests and understands at a deep level how all of the code fits together.

What's also missing is how to actually make extensible designs. I have seen very, very few designs that were able to accommodate unforeseen changes, and none that resulted from good coding practices.

Most often I've observed that the more process and organization surrounds a development effort, the more likely that effort will outright fail (sometimes by never getting completed, more often by never actually fulfilling the function that was designed for, then abandoned. The difference is that the second kind is very much declared complete).

Recently a thorough focus on code hygiene (unit tests taken to a ridiculous levels, for instance) is one more warning sign that it's time to find something else to do. The biggest warning signs are project teams way bigger than they need to be, but ... Code hygiene nazis merely join the documentation madness of a few years back, PMs should control everything because Steve Jobs was a successful asshole, we need 5 design docs before even knowing what the problem is, ...

Good management needs to tend to the longer term health of their team and organization. A rockstar developer shipping working software is good, but when that person quits or no one understands their code or they're a jerk causing other team members to be unhappy, that is a problem.

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