The Unethical Developer's Guide to Personal Success

Here's a satirical blog post I wrote about prioritizing one's own success over the team's, written as a guide for someone who wants to be an "unethical developer".

The premise: sometimes the developer experience (DX) in a project is so bad that we can't talk about "10x developers", but instead have to talk about "0.10x developers", where you cannot get anything done easily. What if it's due to purposeful actions instead of a variety of other factors? The article goes into some aspects that can make the development worse for everyone, should someone prioritize their own success (even at the expense of making others do worse) over everything else.

Thankfully, I haven't seen people who tick all of these boxes, but certain aspects do occasionally pop up, because of others (or even myself) not considering certain aspects or the implications of what they're doing. At the end of the day, we should think about how what we do affects the team and the project in the longer term. Not just whether it will scale, but also whether the current implementation, tools and practices won't make people miserable.

Developers should absolutely be able to try out new technologies and practices, however perhaps not having that first time be on production projects. Only technologies that solve the problems you have is appropriate, as opposed to CV driven development. That's why side projects, pilot projects, hackathons and such all matter, as does continuously learning about ways to do things better. For those, a good environment, colleagues and community all are needed.