The Marx programmers
Posted: Friday, April 2, 2010 by Ric in Labels: development, funStuff, geek, Japan, programming
El estupido: Nothing to say, jump straight to my tip: to work with this kind of person, you have to lower yourself to their level, lower the level of every element on your team and also the expectations of your combined work, once you do that, things may go on without that many problems, if not, even the best plans will fail at his hands and it will be someone else’s fault.
The copycat: there is a famous saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” which makes perfect sense, but is poorly understood by many developers and more often by management people, who, think it means: just copy someone else’s code, no point in thinking or understanding what is really going on, as long as it works.
Well sometimes it just may happen that coding something your self can be much faster than![code_monkey_small[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIniPHa87jpZ1zrsl648t01s8hPA4N82_fQYZ8jXI5vZvFabgNfNg1Z4VUj9kR7YDBO6iHK3lyP8vWTX-ChObAfN-JTVeWHLLVQnkL92rcvxQ6hKKArF_O0-Nzmt8bVvJqTfCuyWePQkZw/s1600-h/code_monkey_small%5B1%5D%5B4%5D.jpg "code_monkey_small[1]")
In the best cases, this kind of programmer will create bad code out of good one, in the worst cases, he or she will make a career out of search engine driven copy paste code development.
The work produced by such a person, will be iteratively demonstrated to an audience to find out if its “ok”, until the number of fails possible or the patience of the clients is exhausted.
This kind of guy, will, unfortunately at times, be considered productive enough; in some badly managed institutions, they may even be given a certain amount of power and credibility, which more often than not also results in poor decision making.
(they often end up googling for decisions online, which is quite different from performing research on a subject, the first hit they get on a topic becomes gospel)
My tip: get pragmatic with this guy, don’t try to make sense of this person, enlightenment has to come from within or from a higher power, if you are not this guy’s boss, and your boss actually values the work of a lemming, then basically you either become one, continue to insult yourself by being made an equal to someone who does not value the gift for creative process, or you move on to work somewhere more appropriate for humans…
Lastly the “Who are you?” Character
Funny enough, I always see one of these, in every office, the quiet guys who often “seem busy” enough, but are never really doing anything, its almost like they don’t really exist; you even forget who they are and what they were hired for…they usually don’t have an opinion, no input, may seem nice and respectful, but ultimately, aren’t doing any work and have no work done to show… still, they are always there, often arriving before you get in the office and lingering on after you leave.
My tip: of all types these are the ones to avoid at all cost, they make for formidable foes when provoked, are extremely good at sabotage and make everyone else seem quite annoying compared to how quiet they are:
If you do ask them to do something for you, they will make sure it’s the last time you’ve ever asked them to do anything at all.
Since there isn’t a board responsible for evaluating IT professionals, it’s the employer’s responsibility to train and increase the professional level of workmanship of their employees.
Competent and competitive companies do this, Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc these are all successful companies setting themselves as a good example to follow.
Being an optimist, I believe evolution will make it so one day all companies will see the benefit of enforcing best practices and avoid the cowboy approach to software development, improving the work conditions of us programmers (and hopefully the end products we produce)
Me, I see myself more like a Jerry Lewis kind of guy, easily distracted, but always trying to learn or researching on what the most appropriate/productive way of doing things is, trying to code as often as I can (sometimes just for fun), sometimes blog reading and on the increasingly rarer idle times, browsing for the latest cat meme…to avoid getting bored.
Which is funny…since here in Japan, people are seen sleeping pretty much anywhere:
So actually, in this culture, it’s better to be seen sleeping at your desk rather than to be seen actively performing a task which isn’t strictly work related (like reading twitter posts)
