Comment by mastre_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mastre_ | Hacker News Reader

Cuts both ways tho. There are developers (some good, most not) who are notorious about not testing their code. "I don't know dude, it doesn't seem to work -- did you test it?" is fair game in these cases, especially once a pattern has been established. As in, why don't you look into it and figure out why it doesn't work instead of asking me to do it for you? As in, letme-not-googlethatforyou. Of course, depending on severity, action should be taken right away to address this bad habit.

Re: "no hello", I'm not fully with it. Some developers enjoy a more human-like interaction which doesn't play into the unfriendly programmer/BOFH stereotype. Lack of testing will cost the company a lot more time and have more damaging effects than people saying hi to each other (which could be argued to be worth the little extra time it takes to play out):

  1. Dev commits untested code
  2. QA has to catch it
  3. QA has to fill bug report
  4. Dev not known for testing has to read bug report
  5. Dev not known for testing has to fix bug
  6. Dev not known for testing has to test reported bug
  7. Dev not known for testing has to commit fix
  8. QA has to look at again, and either approve/close or send back to step 3.
     - versus -
  1. Dev commits tested code
  2. QA tests change
  3. QA approves change

One pet peeve is people who ask "can I ask you a question?" - this doesn't have the same positive benefit as "hey, how's it going? how was your wknd?", it doesn't seem to serve any purpose. I typically ask people, nicely, to just ask the question directly next time and I'll answer when I'm able, if can't right away. Especially in a chat-type environment in a geographically/timezone-diverse team.

> "can I ask you a question?" .. doesn't seem to serve any purpose

I think of it as a request for a context switch. If you're mentally occupied - writing a tricky recursive function, say - and somebody walks up and says, "Hey, what's the time complexity of inserts into a red-black tree", it's likely that just parsing the question will kick you out of your current context so you lose track of what you're doing.

That is how it works for our team. Normally if someone skips that step it's more urgent and I temd to answer (they have already asked and distracted me so why not). I don't really mind pleasantries, they remind me I am working with humans.

I find that for me, "Hey are you busy?" is enough to drag me out of my focus. At that point you may as well ask me about the time complexity of red-black tree inserts. That way I get the request over with and back to what I was doing.

> One pet peeve is people who ask "can I ask you a question?"

Back when I was TA'ing a course in college, about half of the students on average in office hours would start their conversations with me by saying "I just have one small question." I'm not sure what was worse, when they didn't just have one question (or it wasn't small) or when the question was so small they could have gotten an answer by the time they finished assuring me that they weren't going to take up much of my time.

I could see myself getting annoyed if it's a student I have never seen before. I absolutely adore and love it when the same students come to office hours every time. For some reason, it makes me very content and happy, and it's just such a pleasure to see eager students utilizing resources like that. Those students, I am much more casual with, and couldn't care less if they talk to me on that meta "can I ask you a question?" level.

I didn't really mind it that much, I mostly found it amusing that students were so worried about taking up too much time that they'd end up taking more. And you're right, if it was one of the regulars, I definitely didn't mind, and I'd sometimes tease them mildly about it.

I experienced the "can I ask you a question?" when I did that in office hours. My usual response is "Yes, what did you think I was here for?" After two or three times they just learned to ask the questions directly.

Yes. I have seen developers like that. It is not a very good career choice, as nobody wants to work with them. I personally call it spoonfeeding.

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