The Meaning Behind The Secret Developer’s Dream?

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Even The Secret Developer has time off the grid. Sometimes they’ll run out to the supermarket to stock their shelves with more ramen. Other times they’ll ‘hang out’ in the back of an Apple store shouting insults at both the customers and Apple staff until they are removed from the store.

In this article, we explore the dreams of The Secret Developer. Not their dreams for the future, this is about the actual dreams they have had during their sleep.

The Situation

“For me, it’s vacation. I can’t shake a recurring dream that is cutting time asleep and degrading my performance at work.

I’m one of those developers who needs to get their sleep, to perform and solve problems effectively through the working day.

Here is what is going on.”

The Dream

“Many of us dedicated software developers dream about our respective codebases. I’ve done so in the past but what is happening right now is worse because of the quality of the code.

I’m dreaming about the awful modularization of our code. Classes are in the wrong place, and it makes it difficult to work. That means before doing any work a great amount of refactoring needs to be done first — usually with a series of comments on the pull request demanding ‘If you’re moving this file, refactor it too’. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in the day, and it takes around 4 hours to get a code review in our place.

So, back to the dream. It’s simply about me coding and trying to solve problems in the codebase. Slowly typing. Getting slowed down in the review process and failing to make any real progress on the features I’m committed to work on. It’s leading to me waking up at night and really impacting my performance during the day.”

The Horror Of This Nightmare

“That isn’t the only issue. When you have a pedestrian dream about simply doing the job it’s not only boring. When you go to work the next day, it feels like you’ve already put in a day’s work.

I’m saying that working through trash code is miserable — ‘It’s all the fault of the previous coder’ and it’s affecting me through my core.”

Is The Secret Developer Simply Incompetent?

“This isn’t an excuse from an incompetent developer. It’s someone who accepted a job without ascertaining:

- the quality of the code

- the number of contractors employed by the company, meaning the focus is away from tech debt

Essentially The Secret Developer should never have accepted this job. This naivety is not something to be proud of and is something that The Secret Developer will work to make sure that they never exhibit in the future.”

Conclusion

The Secret Developer should be fired, or at least quit. Right?

“The alternative is for me to let it go. I can see some of my colleagues don’t care about the code or the quality of what we push. Maybe I should do the same? Let me know in the comments as ruminating on this is not a good way to spend my vacation!

Frankly, I’d rather spend this time using new technology and making my code better. Isn’t that what we all should do with our time off? Right?”