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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

    I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.






  • I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.


  • What I like to tell people is that I am as good a programmer as I am for the simple reason that I began when I was about 8, which gave me a very early start on making all of the mistakes one can possibly make when learning how to code.

    (It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)