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Comment by wakeywakeywakey | Hacker News Reader

TBH, I read this as: we mismanaged the project for months (years?), reduced scope creep by negotiating with the client, and finally implemented what should have been the version 1.0 solution while shifting the blame entirely on the loner dev who worked himself into a corner trying to catch up to our sales department's untenable promises.

Everyone created the problem, the dev was an easy target to eat the blame because of his ego.

"We could not build a hotel, so we bought new hammers and built a great dog house instead."

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I think I have to agree with you. The fact that Rick was allowed to be turned from a Dr. Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde is kind of the company's fault. No one stepped in to hold Rick accountable during meetings?

While I no longer work there, my first job with some programming had me training to understand the code, what it was about, and even how to write it.

To this day, I still use this method so I don't get lost or bored in my code.

These are the lines I actually use along with commenting my own code just in case I have to return back to it weeks or months or even years later, I don't have to try and trace every step back to a particular code.

  // AUTHOR: MG
  // FILENAME: functions.php 
  // STATUS: ACTIVE
  // PURPOSE: All of the functions for this application (app name)
  // NOTES: There are several unused functions in this file that are commented out but once in production
  // They can be deleted as we likely will not be needing them at all.

Those 5 lines have saved me a lot of time. While I don't include the "author" line since it just me writing the code, if there are tons of hands in there, you should know EVERY SINGLE author as well as when code gets commented, it should contain the initials upfront, such as // mg: this does this and this does that. If I know multiple files touch.. I also add: "ASSOCIATIONS:" and list all files that call this one.

Using this method, I've been able to complete a bunch of projects much quicker because any time I start to forget: what am I doing? what does this code do? am I on the right track? I can look right at the beginning of a file and know the answer.

I'm not saying that a boss or supervisor has to be a micromanager, but meetings are necessary to understand where everyone is at. Leaving a programmer to do his own thing means that he really is doing his own thing and is more likely to get lost in the code. I'd say more like he wasn't a genius but thought he could do it alone.. and sometimes, it is nice to have someone step in and tell you: "Hey where we at? What can we do to speed this up?" or even provide their own insight... I can't tell you how many times I've talked with my spouse about an issue.. and she's suggested, "Why don't you just do this?" and it has saved me hours of time just because of someone not in the code is able to see another solution.

> AUTHOR: MG

This is already in your commit history, so why hardcode it into the source?

> FILENAME: functions.php

This is obvious because you just opened the file. So again, why even put it there? When the file gets renamed the documentation is no longer correct? These things are also hard to refactor.

> STATUS: ACTIVE

Every part of the code is always active...

> PURPOSE: All of the functions for this application (app name)

Okay, probably the most useful one here. But what if we're refactoring the code and the purpose changes? Or if someone adds a few functions and the documentation no longer covers the purpose?

> NOTES: There are several unused functions in this file that are commented out but once in production They can be deleted as we likely will not be needing them at all.

Very dangerous, again because the source might change while the documentation doesn't. But why even write "they can be deleted"? Why not just delete them? That's what version control is for.

I'm not sure why you're being down voted, but this is a very reasonable counter point.

The purpose or brief should be at the top of every file, it should also evolve as class or implementation does. Arguable that it's really the only one that matters and can also come from no other tool or location.

Avalaxy, while I know companies use tools to do their thing... I don't, I'm old school. I have files on an FTP server and I write PHP code.

But to explain:

> Author: completely optional, depends on what you are using, you aren't wrong.. since I'm old fashioned, if I were to hire some coder to help me maintain my programs, I'd like to know that he was in there, and I'd have no way of knowing.. again, probably not anyone's issue, but I'm old fashion.

> Status: Not all files are in use, but sometimes they are just leftover and may not be deleted, or sometimes, they might be used for testing purposes -- so Status can be changed to INACTIVE, TESTING PURPOSES ONLY, etc. Maybe the file is inactive because newer code was written, but this was kept as an archive? You never know.

> Purpose: always state the purpose of the code.. if it changes, than this should probably change. If it doesn't, than again: you must be doing your own thing.

> Notes: optional, this is just notes that might be necessary..... again.. Notes to myself: I have some code in there that is not currently being used and if I go into production, I probably won't need it so may as well delete it.

The Notes weren't supposed to be taken as a literal. This is just notes to anyone who reads the file.

Sure, there is a such thing as too much commenting, but no one wants to go through the code to figure out what it does. Leaving a little comment up top of every page, regardless of the simplicity or complications of the function, it is just nice to leave for anyone who has to go in there. It's a better form of organization. Imagine having to go in there 3 years later... would you remember what it does? The little statement up top might help you remember more quickly.

rcs has been around ~40 years. you're not old school. you're sloppy.

Well, I'm glad you don't have to go into my code to see that sloppy tabbed mess full of comments and code :)

"Old school"? I think it's in most cases irresponsible not to use version control. Sorry to say, but it's "amateur hour". No better than "Rick".

I agree with one of the parents that "Purpose" is probably the most useful, but even there: at that level the code should be largely self-documenting.

I never said I didn't have version control.

To assume "at the code level it should be largely self-documenting" is to be a Rick. Comments are there to help everyone, including non-programmers understand what is going on.

What am I to make from: "while I know companies use tools to do their thing... I don't", if not that you're not using a version control tool?

It's not "genius behavior", but well accepted from people like Uncle Bob, that documentation should be in the names of small and focused functions, methods or classes, not in comments.

> To assume "at the code level it should be largely self-documenting" is to be a Rick

You don't have to be a Rick to write clean, concise code.

I'd strongly recommend reading up:

http://www.codeodor.com/index.cfm/2008/6/18/Common-Excuses-U...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-without-comments/

I have been coding for almost 40 years and always been big on documenting code, but the problem is that code changes and documentation doesn’t always keep up.

Given modern tools I’ve come to the conclusion that documenting overall purpose and specific edge cases is more than enough. For example, the file header should describe its purpose, and anything in the actual code that’s not obvious should be commented. No more boilerplate function or file comment header. Git tells me who wrote each line of code, I know the name of the funcs and files, and I can see the inputs/outputs for every func with my own two eyes.

> I have been coding for almost 40 years and always been big on documenting code, but the problem is that code changes and documentation doesn’t always keep up.

This has always been a sign for me to tread very, very carefully. People who change code without changing the comments probably didn't read the comments, didn't read the code or didn't understand it - either way, if comment and code disagree both are probably wrong.

I agree mismatched comments/code is a huge warning sign. But I think requiring standardized comments is a problem.

When I started out every function had to have a header comment, with name, inputs/outputs, description of purpose/etc. It was significant extra work to keep that up to date. I could update a function three times in a day, and have to rewrite the comments three times to check it in.

And in the end, I know the name of the function. I can see the inputs and outputs. The only part of those comments that were occasionally useful were purpose, details of which often changed with edits. And in reality, as long as the function isn't hundreds of lines long (another problem), I can read it and discern exactly what it's trying to do.

Comments that were most useful said stuff like "this looks weird or dumb, but we had to do it this way because of this thing we and you probably didn't expect in the data/system/etc"

You said initially companies have their tools and you don't. Later you went on about simply using ftp and coding php. It sure seems like you don't use version control. At least not at a level that it should be used at in this day and age.

For what logical purpose would a non-programmer be reading your source code and only be able to accomplish whatever their task is if you adequately comment it?

> Avalaxy, while I know companies use tools to do their thing... I don't, I'm old school.

You would do well to learn source control system (which these days basically means git).

Leaving aside the team/collaboration part, once you learn it, it's so incredibly freeing. I cannot understate this enough.

You can make changes to the code, and then go back with one operation (discard changes). You can work on an experimental idea (in a branch) for a few days/hours, then switch back to your main code to fix an important bug, go back and finish your experimental branch eventually, and merge everything together -- often with nearly zero effort. If you're supporting multiple release versions at once, you can fix a bug in one and often easily apply it to all other versions.

Ever have a situation where something just stops working, but you're not sure when other than in worked four months ago? You can arbitrarily check out any old version and test, and even - in a single operation - undo that change from the current version of code.

Can you do all this without source control (or with copies named by date)? Sure, but it's kind of like the difference between fetching water from a well using a hand pump and bucket vs having running water and being able to open a tap. Before you have running water, it's just life, and it's not that big a deal to fetch water, really. Once you have it, you could never imagine having to live life that way.

I do know what "source control" is but even when I wasn't working for myself, my boss made me still add this stuff, despite knowing at the end, upon saving, it would ask what changes were made.

We used something called "Source Safe" from Microsoft.

As for what's in the Notes and deleting it upon live production... that is the old stuff... in case the new stuff stopped working for whatever reason.

I guess we all have our own methods of doing things. Fortunately, I've not had major issues, though everything is backed up to it a server upon my completion of work for the day.

Man, you're banging rocks together and working hard, rather than smart. My sympathies for being stuck with a crapfest like sourcesafe.

Your status reasoning seems weak. Archive? Version control will have it in history. Maybe rarely you want it around for active references. Otherwise you likely don't need it.

The author bit is solved with version control. Much better than a line that can get bogged down with multiple authors or be outdated.

It doesn't feel like you're being old fashioned or old school. It seems like you're being a bit stubborn in your ways. Version control is a good thing. Perhaps there's better ways. Going your way with not having an sort of real alternative isn't right though.

Your other reasons like coming back years later can be applied to version control too. It's helpful to have commits that have diffs, time stamps, author, and other meta data. Imagine having to come back 3 years later without any of that. Commit history might help you remember and manage your project more quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

I'm an old school surgeon... I like to operate without using anesthetics or sterilizing my tools.

Much like the old school surgeon, he hops on the production server and types very quickly to minimize website downtime.

"Time Me, Gentlemen!"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/time-me-g...

You need to seriously stop wasting time talking about this on HN and learn you some basic git.

https://try.github.io/

It's not hard. It's not like you're computer illiterate and don't know how to program.

> I have files on an FTP server and I write PHP code.

None of that prevents you from using source control.

I will have to admit that this GIT/SVN is a very elegant solution in the ideal world, but in my experience real world code gets very very messy. Teams get lazy and don't always give very detailed commenting in version control.

Startups may be better at this, but the corporate world is even messier with quick turned spaghetti code. Any markup in the codebase itself helps the next developer tremendously.

Personally, I find @mattbgates best practice to be very justifiable in practical use.

Why don't you use source control instead. Don't say who you are in the comments, that's what "blame" is for. Don't comment code, delete it, it won't be lost since you have a history. Make a branch for your experiments if you have to. The state of your work should be apparent in the bugtracker.

Code comments are code comments. If you use comments to help with your development process, there is probably some work to do with your toolchain. Good source control and a bugtracker are a must.

Reminds me of this style:

  /**
   * Calculate the thing.
   *
   * @param $foo the foo value
   * @param $bar the bar value
   * @return the thing
   */
  function calculateThing($foo, $bar) {
      return $foo + $bar; // add foo and bar
  }

Such comments are worthless noise that obscures the important parts of the code and camouflages any actual useful comments that might be there. I would so much rather have better names than "thing", "foo", and "bar", and maybe a comment about why the values are summed, if it's not obvious. When you do those right, you won't even need many comments. Maybe a docblock, but don't bother with that if it's nothing more than a robotic "English version" of what is already obvious from the function definition. IMO most good developers will perceive your file header as a redundant annoyance for similar reasons, as other commentors have explained.

It's the "CS 050 Computer Science for Humanities Majors" type of commenting (I was a humanities major, no offense intended). A bunch of comments that are only there because you think you have to have comments, or because you're graded on whether or not comments exist.

Also, I'm not sure I'd apply the label "genius" with someone who has copious amounts of "copy pasta" in his solely crafted code base.

Makes you wonder why the company would consider him their "top talent".

I imagine that it's because he delivered, rather than taking the time to abstract away stuff which might not need to be abstracted away.

Remember that very, very few organisations (companies or in academia) have 'quality code' as an overarching goal: rather, they want good enough code, soon. Time after time I've seen developers fall into one of two traps: abstracting too soon or too late. It's very, very difficult to avoid.

My preferred method is to just hack together something that works over a couple of iterations, then spend an iteration refactoring. It's hard to convince a business that this refactoring time isn't wasted, but it is in fact extremely valuable to the code base. 'I need to do this now so that I can satisfy your change requests later' sometimes works.

This was my take as well. The guy was working 12 hours a day 7 days a week, with the fate of the entire project on his shoulders it's no wonder he turned in to 'Mr. Hyde'.

Management should have stepped in long before it got to that stage.

Not only that, but if they wound up throwing away so much supposedly unmaintainable code, then he wasn't the great developer they thought he was.

My feeling was that the spec they wrote and sold was "very hard." Rick neglected to push back (or did and was told too bad) and then the entire project was mismanaged.

Maybe Rick was an asshole, but this post kind of blows my mind. I'm making some assumptions here but "two years" of delay isn't something one person causes (unless they're enabled to).

Exactly...what was going on for 2 years that they could slam out a replacement in just a few months?

If he had the respect of his coworkers, I'm guessing "Rick" was really a 10x programmer, BADLY MANAGED. You need somebody else who understand the project objectives and can put a limit to the development of "configurable" options.

>Rick’s product supported a dynamic workflow with over fifteen thousand permutations. In reality 99% of our use cases followed one of three paths. The team hard-coded the workflow. This removed over 30% of Rick’s work

That's a failure of the manager, not the programmer. The good programmers, the ones who enjoy their work, will choose a complicated but beautiful path, will choose to make a configurable workflow whose configuration is itself configurable in LISP. It's the manager job to know that the workflow can be hard-coded and then avoid complexity by the love of complexity (good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code). If not managed correctly, 10x programmers will choose the most complex, self-configurable solution where a hard-coded workflow will do.

TL;DR: It seems a manager failure. Top talent needs top management in order to focus great creativity in the narrow path of productivity clients will pay for.

I've seen a lot of clients and managers ask for infinitely configurable software more often them I've seen devs introduce it as unnecessary complexity. It's often asked by businesses in the hope that afterwards all change are free and don't require a dev to make. Futile for sure, I constantly have to tell the business why that's not sane, and that they actually don't have that many use cases.

I think you misunderstand what "10x programmer" is intended to mean (even though I hate this term and think it is mostly rubbish). A 10x wouldn't make some ungoldly amount of complexity "just because", they would implement the simplest solution that meets the given requirements - hence they're "10x more productive" than other developers; this doesn't mean 10x LOC, just being pragmatic. The ones you describe are the non-10x.

Anyway IMO you have more like 4 types of dev, the ones who fail to write fizzbuzz, the ones who can do the vast majority of what they are asked, the ones that can do everything and can self manage and stay focused on (and clarify) product requirements (probably what you mean by 10x) and the ones that have highly specialized skills (e.g. ML, graphics, embedded systems, etc).

Also a 10x Dev would usually go back to the product manager/client and say that feature X looks kind of redundant or a really edge case, but would take a significant chunk of time to code. Is it really needed for v1.0 considering it will cost 2 weeks of Dev Time?

You obviously need to have a good understanding of your clients and their needs and the way they use your product to e able to do that, but many shops simply ignore introducing their developers to the actual users of the product.

> That's a failure of the manager, not the programmer. The good programmers, the ones who enjoy their work, will choose a complicated but beautiful path, will choose to make a configurable workflow whose configuration is itself configurable in LISP. It's the manager job to know that the workflow can be hard-coded and then avoid complexity by the love of complexity (good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code).

I see this as a programmer responsibility... how is the manager even supposed to know whether it's hard-codeable?

The trouble is often that the programmer doesn't get enough information to make this decision, but that's a different story.

The buck stops with the manager. Every time. Only a poor carpenter blames his tools and people are a managers tools.

If a carpenter doesn't pay attention and a sharp saw cuts their hand off or ruins an expensive piece of wood maybe they need training in how to run saws. Or perhaps they just need less powerful saws until they get more experience.

Management is a lot more than going to meetings and ordering people around. The ability to successfully staff and orchestrate a project is no small skill and one can't just jump in and expect success. Lot of people think they can do it, but there are very few really good managers in my experience. Most are hacks who can't actually do the job and don't even understand what it entails. As evidenced by the article.

> good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code.

I can't speak for good programmers, but while I admire elegant and insightful solutions where possible, for the other 99% of the cases I prefer the simplest effective solution (and with simple definitions of 'simple').

A good programmer solves the given problem in the most simple, decoupled, way possible. Their solution will inevitably be easy for other devs to jump in and understand and work one with breaking the rest of the code base.

Sounds like they graded him on feature completion rather than how he implemented the features. It's a one sided story though. I've seen projects fail due to constantly "rearranging the furniture."

I also think it's kind of silly to criticize a solo developer for not documenting. Has anyone seen a mid-sized team that doesn't explicitly delegate or make documentation a priority?

Now you expect a solo person to document?

I expect every professional developer to do at least the minimum necessary level of documenting, be they solo, small team, big team, startup, corporate, etc, etc.

No developer is a solo developer. At a bare minimum, Present You is working with Future You. And Future You would appreciate it if Present You documented your work.

The biggest problem of being a solo developer is that there is no one else to drive documentation needs. Yes, documentation would be great for future you, but present you has no one (including future you) to chat with about the code to get an idea of what documentation would be useful. If you are forced to work just inside your head, then the result is going to be obvious and predictable.

And no, talking to the rubber ducky doesn't help.

on the contrary, many good developers do know what to write. They understand what the software does, and why, and they are capable of explaining it. They know what decisions were made, and why they were chosen over other options. Above all, they know where the tricky bits are (because they solved them), which are, for the most part, going to be the tricky bits for anyone following.

Anything you talk to the rubber ducky about probably deserves writing down.

I use "tired me". I think once or twice I've used "inebriated me".

In the beginning of my career I was much more diligent about this (but I also didn't write as readable code, so it was more necessary); the exercise was simple:

When I hit the stupid part of the day (the end of the day), I go back over code. When I don't understand something, I write down something about my confusion. In the morning, when I'm back to being smart, I convert all the confusion to comments and/or better code.

> Now you expect a solo person to document?

Yes, unless it is single-use code. Otherwise, if the person is only developing for himself, he can choose whether or not to write any documentation, but if he is sensible, he will write something.

It is moot anyway, as he was not supposed to be a solo developer.

This thing reminded of a sketch I saw sometime ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

This gives me flashbacks...

Let's understand the context... The author has spent the last 10 years in University IT. Easy to see how it takes years to realize something is out of control and not managed well.

Firstly, I don't see this guy being scapegoated - he appears to have been given the option of being part of the solution, but refused, and he appears to have worked himself into a corner by refusing to work with anyone.

More generally, while I don't know any more about this case than what is in the article, I have seen something matching the description given here, and the situation there was not as you describe, except in that the fault lay both in the developer and his managers.

He thought he was an exceptional developer and he was going to prove it by writing really complex code, even if the application did not need it (he did not, of course, describe it as complex - it was, in his mind, elegant, object-oriented (it was a time when that was still the one true way), efficient, reusable... but in reality, it was mostly a mixture of unnecessarily complex and confused.)

Naturally, he was averse to working with morons who could not immediately follow what he was doing, so he worked alone, obsessively, and incessantly. As time went by, more of his explanations for why some feature could not be made available now were based on the complexity he had introduced earlier in the process.

Management takes the blame for allowing this situation to develop. His initial managers were insecure about their technical ability, and deferred to his judgement - it was a case study in why technical managers need technical knowledge (to be fair, they were also snowed by a load of non-technical responsibilities that sucked up the time for running the project.)

In the end, he precipitated the issue by resigning (presumably, he had found some other manager impressed by his apparent mastery of all things technical.) By then, I had moved on and I don't know it ended up.

Ah, I see!

So from one article and no actual evidence or information, a random Hacker News subscriber managed to determine that a story about a bad dev written by an insider on the project was actually about a poor, amazing, faultless dev who worked at the whim of Bad Management.

Because, as we all know, Management Bad, Dev Good.

I agree.

Maybe some of the developers weren't exactly up to snuff as well. Code — across an entire domain — typically doesn't vary as much in complexity as people's ability or knowledge can/would/does/is.

It's definitely tough to see what actually happened here from the outside.

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