How to be an Indispensable Programmer | Hacker News Reader

How to be an Indispensable Programmer

farbeyondprogramming.com

9 pointskennethchu11 comments

Weird, weird list. Smile? Be a friend? Eh? Is this a social club?

My list is a lot shorter: (a) write lots of good code out of personal inclination (rather than being forced by code reviews or because you are being nagged or whatever) and (b) be able to troubleshoot your way out of a paper bag.

I really don't care if you smile at me or not.

Is this a social club?

No, but I would prefer not to work with a douche-bag.

However, if you're only referring to the strict subset of traits that make you a good programmer (and nothing else), then yes I agree.

A person who doesn't smile, or isn't overly friendly is a douche-bag? I think you have your definitions mixed up. Introverts, reserved people, naturally taciturn people, super-shy people, people from cultures that don't show their teeth at every opportunity - they are perfectly fine people and can be a joy, a joy to work with.

People are great to work with when the work just "flows" around them. Their personalities are (mostly) orthogonal with that. It doesn't make them assholes. Come to think of it, the assholes are more likely to smile. YMMV.

I agree 100% but you seemed to be implying that one's coding skills were the only determining factor in whether or not you are a good employee which is what I was responding to.

A person who doesn't smile, or isn't overly friendly is a douche-bag?

Generally, yes.

It's human nature to be judgmental. You can disagree with it all you'd like, but ignoring it will directly impact you in a negative way.

It's why I try to go out of my way to smile and ask someone about themselves every time they come by to ask me a question / chat / whatever, even if I don't feel like it.

Such positioning may seem fake, but I feel it's "fake" in the same way wearing clothes is "fake". You can disagree with wearing clothes, but running around without pants won't win you much respect.

Yeah sure, it might affect how much people like you. Unfortunately, when you have to sit around a table and decide who has to be laid off, I am sorry to say I have never known likeability to be a consideration. If someone is nice you will feel worse about having to let them go, but you are never going to get rid of your grumpy hero programmer to keep the slow-coding nice guy. I can say this from experience.

The OP was about being indispensable; and as I said, the person who is indispensable is the one the business can least afford to lose. There are occasionally other considerations, but they are all done without reference to most of the items on that list, at least from what I have seen.

Good point.

I will add c) Share your knowledge

Most of the time I am thinking about the latest bug or issue at hand when going to get my coffee and hardly notice people let alone giving a smile. I have some other highly respected programmers working at the same floor as me hardly giving a smile to anyone, but everybody knows they are indispensable.

The article seems more like linkbait than anything else

Better to be a dispensable programmer. Teach others and share knowledge and understanding and make the team as a whole "Built To Last" (http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Compan...).

You only have people you "can't lose" when the whole team is mediocre. If you have at least couple great programmers they will usually have enough drive to learn every aspect of the project. And they will be able to pick up anything in days even without much knowledge sharing.

I've found it doesn't always work that way. For instance, we have a legacy homebrew billing system that's a Lovecraftian nightmare of procedural PHP batch pipelines. We're all eagerly looking forward to just replacing it wholesale, but in the meantime nobody delves into it, partly to preserve our sanity and partly because nobody wants to be marked as "the guy who knows it best" and condemned to maintaining it. All the original developers on that part of the system quit months or years ago, but we have the last of them on retainer to recover it from its failures. That's the guy we couldn't lose.

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