Perverts Don’t Fit in Software Development Teams
Photo by Rune Enstad on Unsplash
In recent times I’ve needed to leave an important detail about my software engineering career off my resume.
I have to hide it in interviews.
My code is clean and well-tested.
Test coverage
I’m working in a place where developers routinely “forget” to test classes in their code, particularly where it is difficult to do so.
It just doesn’t fit with the program to aim for 100% test coverage.
At work, you need to hide this type of perfectionism.
Simplicity
You’re using the wrong data structure there, a set and an array are different.
This is a PR comment people hate.
It doesn’t make sense to reuse code within tests either and we should make them work like any other well-written code.
Writing code with cyclomatic complexity ≥3? I don’t like that.
Just do it better.
Comments in code
I don’t understand why anyone would have a comment in the code to describe what is happening. The method and property names should help, and then the easy readability of the code should make it easy to know what is going on.
That’s probably also why I hate seeing class names that make no sense. Factory when it’s a builder? Processor instead of the repo? Surely, we can do better?
Iterative improvement should be doing everything better.
Thinking of the customer
I keep doing it. The text for the end customer is hard to read, can it be double-checked?
I even asked our feature team how many of us use our customer-facing product every day. None of them is the answer, and I viewed this in a highly negative way.
I make the code, I don’t use the product.
No, you’re doing it wrong
Perhaps luckily, The Secret Developer is just bright enough to realize this type of perversity needs to be hidden.
At interviews, I hide any sign of perfectionism. I must be an utter nightmare to work with, so I drop in a few mistakes if I need to turn in an interview project.
I pretend to make a few msitakes.
Conclusion
I’m not even sure if I think this article is a parody or not. It’s certainly something, and I think we shall leave it at that.
Nobody wants a programmer who writes maintainable readable code. Get that into your codebase.