The same could be said about questioning minor requests from someone who has more experience than you do and who has a greater responsibility to deliver on deadlines. Wasting hours of time over a single line is a great way to make people dislike you for being so inflexible, especially if it’s holding up the work of others on your team.
I firmly believe that all authority should be questioned in the corporate environment. A good manager should have the wisdom to acknowledge that he can fail to see things that the developer did.
If you go by what Clubber proposed then:
* If the manager is right, the developer will notice the value of accepting the technical input of the manager and develop a keener sense of timing within the development process.
* If the manager is wrong, the developer will understand that he shouldn't just accept orders handed down to him and remain mindful of the impact of the changes he makes to the code because his opinion will be respected by the rest of the team.
Now the author mentioned that in his organization "There are processes in place to get things like this removed" so the issue might be more that the developer either doesn't know that the project exists or that it works. Only if it's the later and the manager is sure that refactoring is regularly performed the developer is wrong for his the insubordination.
I do think there’s a time and place to question authority, and maybe this could have been used as a better opportunity for mentoring, but I still think being rigid isn’t great for the team.
If I knew more about the circumstances, I could make a better judgement, but to me it sounds like the lead wanted the developer to put in shit code and he didn't want to. The thing about shit code is it costs 2x, 10x, 100x of technical debt later. Remember the article is written from someone biased towards the lead.
The lead is in charge of making those decisions. Having a working feature in time for the sales demo is more important than some code purity.
They do not understand the difference between getting paid to do a task vs creating a personal hobby project.
I disagree. Sometimes, yes, but most of the time, no. Two days fighting can save years of maintenance costs (and I'm assuming productive fighting, not fighting for the sake of it). Ever developed on a not-well-thought out database model? No foreign keys? No consistent naming? Dates as varchar? You're stuck with it. It not only causes more defects in existing code, it makes enhancements harder and more prone to defects.
But it's hard to speak up on such things. It much easier, mentally, to just say screw it and write the bad code, especially if someone is non-confrontational by nature.
The code doesn't have to be perfect aligned to some doctrine.
If you feel the need to fight back over a single private member variable delay some important release the reasoning must be better than one day in the future it, it will make development slightly harder. Refactoring is a good practice.
It is (sometimes but rarely fundamentally different refactoring) but when a crappy schema has been built on for years, it is exponentially more difficult to refactor, especially a live system with multiple clients and uses. The best (and cheapest) medicine for that is to not inject crappy design in the first place. Sometimes you have to, but it should really taste bad.
>The code doesn't have to be perfect aligned to some doctrine.
If the doctrine is not putting crappy / hacky code in the code base if you can at all help it, I think that's a fairly standard doctrine.
>If you feel the need to fight back over a single private member variable delay some important release
I'm not sure if the article said the discussion would delay a release or that the release was important. All those absolutely do come into play though. If they were in play, you'd think the dev lead would have enough respect for his team to point that out.
I’ve been on both sides, here, so I totally get the desire to write good code (and in my current role I’m working on best practices and good patterns with my team). That being said, good developers also realize that sometimes “hacks” are necessary to get something done, especially when deadlines are looming.
Who among us hasn’t written something awful to get something finished or meet a deadline?
Good developers produce something. (and I'm condemning myself there)