It’s Not You, It’s Your Garbage Code
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
This post is a continuation of The Secret Developer’s tirade about a pull request they declined to approve at work, and how software developers often deal with not getting your way.
“Literary types think of attacks on a person as ‘ad hominem’, that means against the person.
When we review and talk about code it shouldn’t matter one jot about the person. So let us explore why people might take it that way.”
What happens right now
The Secret Developer has (as usual for them) experience of ‘against the person attacks’.
“It’s not exactly an attack, although I was made to feel that way during a coding discussion.
We were talking about a specific coding problem. I told my colleague that I thought there was a problem with his code. He decided to pass whole objects to subclasses rather than just the couple of properties he needed.
His reasoning? He said that he might need them in the future. This coming from a developer who is more senior than me in the organization.
Now that is one thing. Another is how he finished the conversation. He wouldn’t make the changes and said that he was sorry. Like he’d won the argument. In practice, he just wanted to make sure he’d won the argument, even though it was because he could get away with it.”
What needs to happen
When The Secret Developer previously wrote about poor code review practices that make software devs quit they didn’t expand on the way we need to think during code review.
“It’s all about attitude. We should take the approach that the problem isn’t the person it’s just the code.
I’ve said many times at work that ‘it’s just code’. The people I work with still seem to approach work as winning and losing. That’s not how we should be working. We should be working together to find solutions to problems and sharing solutions.”
Breaking down The Secret Developer’s ramblings
We should:
Work together to solve problems
Share solutions
Treat the code as something different from people
Work as a team
Don’t see code discussions as winning and losing
Conclusion
The Secret Developer thinks we should celebrate good code, but equally, we should not knock people out personally for not writing the ideal code.
“That would work if only we didn’t have an environment full of jerks (the bad kind). But there you go.”