Yeah. Also, superficially good looking people can still be sketchy weirdos. Vibe, context, and prior relationship are much more important than looks. Of course, some people can’t get their head around this and start blaming literally anything else: their height, their bone structure, a worldwide conspiracy against them. It’s crazy.

Oh good it’s not just me.

I became a dad late (around middle age) and was telling dad jokes way before that. My theory is it’s less about becoming a father and more about getting older and just wanting to annoy people for my own amusement.

Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”

Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.

Yuck.

At some point, they’re gonna have to debug it.

If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:

Potential problems with the tasks:

• they’re not researched sufficiently
  • is this doable?
  • should we we even be doing this?
  • have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say “well that should be trivial” a bunch?
• there’s not enough info on the tickets
  • inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
• they’re not broken down into small enough pieces
  • are you working “implement X” tickets while everyone else is working a series of “implement X: step N” tickets?

A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.

Potential problems with the codebase:

• someone preemptively optimized it
• it’s not documented well
• it’s spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to

Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)

Potential problems with teammates:

• they’re not supporting you
• they’re grabbing easy tasks because you’re the “code whisperer”
• they didn’t know what they were doing either so they’re vague when you ask them questions

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”

And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.

Hang in there.

It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.

I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.

Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.

Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.

Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.

Or he stayed perfectly still.

Gross.

Oh no they’re gonna tie him up first?

Some Risa memes I can actually hear when I read them. This is one of them.

https://youtu.be/UO5ThFd5qas?si=QScl0GzXbyZMpsk1

Prophet Margins: Eighteen Inches of Linear Time

Give 'em hell!

It is time for my brother to admit he does not remember this week’s Trial of Intelligence.