Month: July 2019

Another meeting which could have been an email – that’s my favorite nag about a meeting hell.

You know it. You know it well. You just want to sit and code, you want to focus for an hour or two and produce some value for the company, for the customers, for the world. Then it shows up. An Outlook reminder. In 15 minutes there will be a meeting. You’re done. You don’t even try to start work anymore because you know it’s impossible to proceed. Time is too short.

The meeting takes five minutes to even begin. Joe comes from another meeting and it took longer than expected so he’s late. Jane is in the toilet. Mark is always late.

During the meeting, you listen to a lot of stuff which doesn’t bother you at all. It’s just a problem which affects two or three people out of eight or ten gathered in a tiny room with not enough air (by the way – this lack of oxygen can affect you).

Finally, you go out of the meeting and it’s lunchtime. After lunch, you’re a bit sleepy and it takes another 30 minutes until the blood will come back to your brain from the stomach.

Half of a day is gone.

Meetings are necessary. Effective organization of them is rare, however. Probably there are some atavistic mechanisms that make us prone to long pointless discussions. As far as I noticed it’s just a lack of emphasis put on the effectiveness of the process of knowledge exchange.

How can we avoid fluff? In some cases it’s tough. But more often than not we can ask ourselves some helpful questions: 
– does the topic require all attendants to be present at the meeting?
– are we prepared for the meeting?
– do we have an agenda?
– is everybody interested and do they need to attend?
– do we need to make a decision quickly or we can use e-mail instead of a meeting room?

Additionally, I would say that boring meetings are a soul-crushing experience. Therefore I would add a few more:
– is the pace of the meeting not too slow, sleepy?
– is the pace of the meeting too fast, too stressful?
– aren’t we too serious?
– aren’t we too much relaxed and offtopic?
– do we take breaks?
– don’t we have too many people in the room?

I believe that minimizing the number of meetings and effectively organizing them can be an amazing improvement in the workplace of a developer. Mental energy sucked by boring, long, nasty meetings organized in crowded rooms is the most precious asset brought by a software engineer to the company. We should take care of this thing. It creates software. It writes code. This energy runs the business. If we drain it we can have huge problems.

Have you ever seen a job offer for a software developer with something like your job will be to maintain our legacy system written in [ name of long-forgotten framework ] with over 100k LoC?

I haven’t.

Because in the software world it’s a bit like putting I have HIV phrase in your Tinder description. There are specific people who would be attracted to it (more about them here) but most of us would rather swipe left (or scroll down to the next job offer).

There’s one simple trick however which could change my mind. It’s one word.

Clean up.

People hate mess. Since the beginning of civilization. As human beings we enjoy order. But at the same time, we usually don’t enjoy maintaining order. That’s why we have a washing machine and dishwasher in most homes.

Humanity has a love-hate relationship with the order. On one hand, in most cultures, people who maintain it are perceived as a lower class or at least disliked: domestic servants, cleaners, police, bureaucrats. But at the same time cleaning up the mess is something heroic. The most well-known example is the fifth Labour of Heracles, which was to clean the Augean stables. The stables have been something like ancient 10M LoC legacy software which doesn’t even compile. TL;DR it was 3,000 cows and 30 years of manure (lack of compilation was caused by the immortality of the livestock). Heracles solved the problem, so to speak, by automation (here are the details). Then he became a well-known hero.

Another great ancient figure considered great after cleaning up the mess is Hammurabi. His method was to introduce some collaboration standards. For example, if someone breaks your build you can break his as well (§ 197). Historians say that the mess started to decrease after his code of conduct was published.

To sum up – maintenance: not cool, clean up: cool.

Unfortunately, more often than, nobody is truly interested in cleaning up the mess when it comes to software. What seems to be a goal of the organizations in most of the cases is to keep the mess alive and somehow productive. It’s understandable but dangerous. Middle management comes and goes, software developers also. Everybody wants to deliver results. But there’s a point of no return on this path. It’s a moment when the development of new features is almost impossible and the maintenance of old parts is ridiculously expensive. New developers don’t want to join the company or leave as fast as they can. Old developers are the only people who somehow know what’s going on in the system, but even they are unable to meet the deadlines. Technologies used in the project are so old they aren’t even supported. Everyday work is like a bath in the manure of 3,000 cows.

It can be avoided. By clean up on time.

Personally – I like to clean a mess. It gives me a pleasant feeling of doing something truly important. I don’t want to say I feel like Heracles, who saves the company from bankruptcy. Oh, well. Ok, maybe a bit I do. Anyway seeing every day how something which is a nightmare of future colleagues becomes an organized structure is satisfying.

Exactly opposite is feeling that every day, with every line of code added to the repository I’m feeding the monster which will digest some developers in the future. I feel it’s irresponsible to do it. It’s like allowing the organization I work for to have a bad habit which brings it happiness today but will give it cancer in 10 years. It’s amoral.

The best way obviously is to maintain a healthy lifestyle since the beginning. Coding standards, code reviews, automated tests, well-crafted architecture – all of us know it. Many of us ignore it. An important thing about the mess is that order indicates the development level. When we look at countries we see chaotic streets of India and well-organized streets of Europe. At first sight, we see where people can be more productive, happy and wealthy. We shall not allow the organizations we work for to fall into chaos.

In Poland, some devs say: I haven’t become a software engineer to talk with people. We, programmers, sometimes like to be perceived as incomprehensible, Heraclitean savants, who stand above the masses of ordinary users. Some of us, look down on junior developers. The internet is full of such memes, showing how dumb junior developers are, compared to legendary seniors.

When we show an old technology to a junior developer

Source: https://thecodinglove.com/when-we-show-an-old-technology-to-a-junior-developer

Among us, developers, there’s a constant battle. The ongoing domination struggle. How many times have I seen refactoring a source code to the shorter version, using unpopular language features just to show off how great our knowledge is… As well as reduced estimations, to prove we’re more efficient. And people starting recruitment processes just for the sake of training. Last but not least – assigning not easy but mundane tasks to junior developers.

In one company I worked for I had a colleague, let’s call him Peter. Peter was a junior developer like me. One day, however, probably due to longer experience, he has been promoted to a regular developer. Two weeks later, when I was working with the source code, I asked my colleagues at the open-space about decimal type in C# which I didn’t know at that time. Peter immediately stopped working and laughed out loudly.

– You do NOT know the decimal!? You’re such a junior dev! – he said

Then some senior developer heard it and laughed out even louder.

– Peter, how dare you to laugh? You asked me the same question one month ago!

Meanwhile, it is cooperation and synergy, not ego and knowledge about esoteric technology features, which creates productive teams that create beautiful, well designed, effective solutions to business problems and make clients happy. After years spent on software development, I’ve understood one thing…

The most important quality of a software engineer is empathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If a developer can see the world through the eyes of other people, he’ll be able to create software easy and comfortable for ordinary people. If he can think outside of his perspective he’ll be able to write the source code understandable for others. Therefore modifying it will be easier and cheaper. Having empathy, the developer will be able to communicate with the business.

As developers, we should always try to improve our empathy. We should ask ourselves as often as possible – will that be understandable for others, who don’t know what I know? Won’t it be overly complex, will it be easy to use? Do I use the language simple enough?

When we recruit developers we should carefully look at their personality. Self-contained, tyrannical people, even if technically brilliant, can create more problems than they solve. I’d recommend to not focus solely on IQ and technical skills. Most of the projects don’t have as monumental technical challenges as we imagine.

Technologies inevitably fade away and disappear. What will be left is the source code. It’s going to be source code written by the people who were able to understand that someone will come after them and that person will need to understand their work, that this person will probably not have deep knowledge about framework and the programming language, and maybe won’t have as deep domain knowledge as they have. Or it’s going to be written by people who don’t care about their successors but themselves rather. Nobody would like to maintain the source code created by the latter. It will be a hell to recruit people and their work will be slow and ineffective. We don’t want it. Therefore – focus on empathy.