Positively Negative
Posted by Davy Brion on August 12th, 2008
I’ve seen some negative feedback on my last post, either from people telling me how they felt about it in person or through email, and from some people on their blogs or just ‘through the grapevine’. And obviously, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But if you really had problems with that post, i think that there are 3 possibilities:
- you might be the kind of developer i was talking about and you don’t realize it
- you completely missed the point
- you aren’t looking at the bigger picture
I don’t want people to think that i’m only being negative, so i wanted to clear this up. Now, if you are the kind of developer i was talking about, then i really can’t say any more. If you were offended by it, then this blog is probably the wrong place for you. I’m sure you’ll find something more interesting to read that fits your goals and purposes more closely.
As for missing the point… some people think that I look down on developers that don’t follow the ‘ALT.NET’ principles. I really don’t look down on them. If you go over my post archive, you’ll see that i have quite a few ‘introductory’ posts in there. The whole point of writing posts that introduce concepts to people who don’t know about them yet is to try to teach them something new. Why on earth would i go through the trouble of writing ‘introductory’ posts for people that i suppossedly look down on? If i am confronted with developers that don’t follow these practices i usually think they either don’t need these practices/principles, or that they simply don’t know about them yet. It surely doesn’t mean that i think they are inferior or anything like that. Again, if that’s what you think, you really haven’t been paying attention to most of the things i’ve been writing about in the last couple of months.
And then there are the people who think i’m merely bitching without offering any solutions. I really think they’re not looking at the bigger picture. Do you want a solution to the problem i discussed in my previous post? Here’s one: don’t hire people like that! They are very easy to weed out during interviews so this really can’t be a problem. And if they’re already there: get rid of them! Even if you have to pay them severance pay or whatever, it’ll be cheaper than the mess they’ll leave behind. I currently don’t have to deal with them in my job, and i can’t even begin to describe how much more productive everyone is if you don’t have to deal with all of that. Another thing i can’t figure out is that in some places, bad situations like the ones i mentioned in my post really can’t be talked about. How could you possibly try to change anything for the better if you can’t even talk about the problem? Do you really expect to introduce change without even being open and honest about the problem? That might take years of time, and if you are willing to spend that much time on it just so you wouldn’t have to be honest, then by all means go ahead, but don’t expect any sympathy from me when you’re venting privately. You do have the possibility to introduce change for the better. But if you sit around being quiet and waiting for the problem to go away, then maybe you aren’t the right person to introduce changes for the better?
So i guess what i’m trying to say is that sometimes you have to be honest about the negatives if you want it to evolve to something positive. We all have our own ways to try achieve that and not everyone can deal with that. But no problems ever got fixed by pretending they weren’t there.
August 12th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
I could tell that last post was going to be a fan-hitting type of post as soon as I read it. I almost wrote a blog post myself about the great developers I work with, just to get the taste of it out my mouth
I don’t have any particular opinion about the content of your “manifesto” - although I am in complete agreement with you on one point - if you have people like that working for you, discard them immediately, but I do believe that posts like that, or rather, approached *from that angle*, will never go over well with anyone, they taste bad because they come entirely from a bad place in the mind. You can say what you like about “changing the status quo” - but the emotional content of the thing was what it was, and it didn’t *feel* like a call to action at all. There is a line between facing a problem head on and stringing up a straw man to set on fire, and I think the manifesto post was definitely on the stereo-type lynching end of the spectrum 
For better or worse, right or wrong, it *does* rub people the wrong way, even though each and every one of us has worked with people like that at some point in time. BTW - those developers aren’t reading your blog or any other blog on building software by their very definition. So, they aren’t the ones that had complaints 
I think instead of bristling against the negative feedback you should consider it a lesson learned, and your blog will be better for it in the long run. 
August 12th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I can definitely see how it rubs some people the wrong way, but i really have no sympathy for people who complain about the same issues to me privately, yet will not stand up to say what they have to say out of fear for any possible backlash. And when those people criticize me for it, it most certainly rubs me the wrong way as well
I don’t really have a problem with criticism because everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If i am wrong about something, by all means come out and say so. But if deep down you agree with me, and if you know that it really is a problem that comes up in many organizations, yet you feel that this can’t be talked about openly then something is clearly wrong.
But yeah, a part of me feels that i really should have made my point differently. But then there’s another part that feels that there’s a lot of hypocrisy about subjects like these…
Anyways, i do appreciate your feedback and i do consider this experience a lesson learned
August 13th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I always think about as, if I can output 40 times more code then the next guy, do I get paid that much? When dealing with ugly code you just gotta start plopping in some test harnesses and refactor the crap out of it, chunk by chunk.
The politics though…I’d just say find a new job. For good developers there are good jobs out there for you. Don’t settle.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
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