Comments on: Don’t Be A Whiny Developer

By: Steve Degosserie

Steve Degosserie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:00:47 +0000

Interesting post … I think that almost every developer goes through a ‘whining’ phase, soon or later. Personally, there are 2 sentences from Eric Evans that really helps me putting things in perspective “Not all of a large system will be well designed” & “Precision designs are fragile”.
Focusing on the key points, whether it’s in terms of technical design and/or methodology, is what’s important. Use incremental refinement anywhere else.
So indeed, complaining almost never helps

By: Whiny Developer

Whiny Developer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:59:18 +0000

Moral hazard anywhere, anytime !!!

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:01:39 +0000

@Pho

i haven’t had to cope with this since i was not a member of that team. if i was, i certainly wouldn’t have put up with it and would’ve had quite a few talks with him.

i know there have been talks, but they didn’t really seem to help.

By: Whiny Developer

Whiny Developer — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:22:29 +0000

Do you know how to get a smart developer ?
Please pay him more money or hire other developer with high salary !!!
Whiny developer get low salary !!
Smart developer get high salary !!
Of course, whiny’s output result is not as well as smart developer.

By: pho

pho — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:13:15 +0000

Food for discussion.

This opens up another question, though. How do you cope with this? I think no-one (well, there’s always exceptions) is ‘whiny’ on purpose. I strongly believe that in most cases, all of these issues can be resolved by simply having a nice heart to heart talk. Quite possibly, the whiny person thinks exactly the same about you.

I can’t help but wonder, since you’ve probably been in this situation yourself once or several times (probably being the inspiration for this post?), how, and if, did you deal with this? And what was the result?

Dealing with difficult people is always, well, difficult.

By: Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:25:48 +0000

I continuously whine about everything including:
Why didn’t you write any unit tests?
Why is your code so hard to test?
Why is your code so resistant to change?
Why do I have to write all this SQL by hand?
Why don’t your bits deploy consistently?
Why can’t I use client side transactions?
Why did you write your own queuing framework?
Why do we make things more complicated than necessary?
Why do we code for six weeks before giving anything to the testers?
Why do we wait so long before we try to integrate with partners?
Why do you think we will get it right this time if we are doing the same thing we did last time?
…

-Bill

By: den Ben

den Ben — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:40:18 +0000

~~Money~~Envy, that’s the basics and the cause!

there… fixed that for ya

By: Whiny developer

Whiny developer — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:25:45 +0000

Money, that’s the basics and the cause!!

By: BV

BV — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:47:02 +0000

Sound advice, surely, but the unfortunate thing is, whenever I see one of these posts, the writer usually has a specific person in mind.