Manifesto for Self-Managed Software Development
flatwire.org
flatwire.org
Take for example the principle of code ownership. I would very much like my junior developers to own the code they develop, fix it and take pride in maintaining it and refactoring it. However, for some of the individuals, their objective is to learn as much as possible in the shortest period of time, so they can grow and get higher paying jobs. This is a perfectly legitimate, indeed desirable objective, for any individual. However, this also, often translates to a lack of interest in maintaining code. So as their manager, I also become the owner of the code. I find myself, maintaining a bunch of code. I'm okay with this. I do delegate some maintenance of the code to others, but I usually find myself modifying and once in a while rewriting the code, until it is in a generally stable state, that does not require much maintenance.
Them there is the idea of voluntary and free collaboration. In general of course, employment is voluntary, but I'm guessing the recommendation is not made in that sense. The idea I think is that programmers should be free to choose their own projects, possibly their own tech stack. That does make sense within the confines of a given business need. However, free reign can be dangerous. I routinely find, that my programmers, prefer to rewrite code in the latest fad framework, rather than simply fix issues with old code. In one extreme instance, I had a programmer use reactJS for what ended up being about 20 lines of plain Javascript. It seems like he wanted to learn to use React. I deployed him onto a project that actually did need react, and rewrote the original code in plain JS. It's now code that needs no maintenance at all.
Nevertheless the sentiments expressed in this manifesto are important to keep in mind I suppose.
I've seen this over and over again. It can be frustrating for a junior developer to create a large class hierarchy using arcane language features to solve a problem that can be done with a function and a for loop. The problem isn't so much that the code itself is more complex than it needs to be, it's that when they leave, someone else will have to pick it up.
Hypothetically speaking, of course...
I work for a research and education network, and the only way to challenge management is via board members who cycle every three years and have little stake in the business, if any.
Larger telecoms are so hierarchical that any progress you might make could be wiped out overnight by some c level or VP who feels threatened or jealous of your team's output.
With consulting firms, we just outsource the hierarchy to a third party and put up blinders to what we work on behalf of.
If anyone is hiring for a data analyst, data science, or general software development role that has high social impact -- please let me know.
Basically they just picked and choose whatever they felt like working on (in both cases they were raised on a pedestal by the company owners so got away with this). They were not team players and other developers needed to pick up the slack on the less interesting grunt work that needed to be done to keep things working.
All of the code did something but none of the code said anything. It was horrible.
I very quickly embraced the notion that software wants a mix of developers of different skill levels, so that any task that must be done can find an author who will remain engaged, and not have to create baroque code to get themselves to do the work.
My team had a discussion about this and some argued that this might alienate programmers who are novices, and might be easier to use "Enlgish" but I think that if the problem space for your software is niche enough then a new team member, or a novice will have to learn terminology either way. In my opinion, programming terminologies are more precise and transferable to other programming jobs and problems in general, so is a more sustainable and relevant way of learning. It might be tough at first, and I agree the attitude of the senior dev would make a huge difference, but as long as the senior dev takes the initial confusion of the novice as a good teaching moment, and explains it patiently and clearly I think it can be more valuable in the long term.
The Pattern Language approach to code didn't have to turn into naming everything after patterns (and then arguing endlessly about the ones that are ambiguously differentiated). It could have just been a field guide to spotting them. I recall reading a few good papers about how 75% of that book is just idiomatic functional programming code. I am blissfully unaware of anyone in the FP space getting suckered into actually naming anything after the official names.
I attended a workshop a couple years back, run by a person who was 1 degree of separation away from the Gang Of Four and he asserted that book was a Masters or PhD thesis for the youngest author and the other people were essentially editors. This was all news to me. I suspect if I had known this I would have pushed back a lot sooner, instead of getting sucked in too. A decade of OOAD ruined by someone's college project...
GoF tells you What. ‘Refactoring’ tells you Why, and gives some pointers on How. In any field, if you know the why and the how of something, and the what doesn’t work itself out? Then you’re in the wrong field.
(He’s gotten promoted twice since we parted ways. He’ll be just fine.)
e.g. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/GOF/hires/chap1fso.htm "An object-oriented program's run-time structure often bears little resemblance to its code structure. The code structure is frozen at compile-time; it consists of classes in fixed inheritance relationships. A program's run-time structure consists of rapidly changing networks of communicating objects. In fact, the two structures are largely independent. Trying to understand one from the other is like trying to understand the dynamism of living ecosystems from the static taxonomy of plants and animals, and vice versa."
I haven't read enough about DDD to know if he was just a precursor or onto something else, but it does seem to map well to my least comfortable work situations.
It annoys me when I have to do some hackerrank crap as an interview, as it's nothing like how I work - having a hard time limit to come up with some algorithm. Or some question about what Python will do if you write it in an obscure and horrible way. I write far better code than I did fresh out of universty, but I am a lot slower at that sort of stuff as I make a point of avoiding it in my work.
Instead of solving the problem, a corner of my brain is thinking "all I want to know right now is: is there a greater than 0 chance that this sort of code appears in a PR and if so, we are done."