Memo to developer bloggers: Get off your pedastal and coach talent

I've written time and time again about how annoyed I get when developers spend incredible amounts of time putting others down under the guise of some nonsense academic debate. It annoys me to no end. Well sit back and block off your afternoon, because here's a post from someone called Stevey that brings it to an entirely new level.

You pretty much know as soon as the word "n00b" is used that you're in for a steaming pile of crap, and this post is no different. To suggest that developers in the 5 to 10 year experience range are "junior" is laughable, ignorant and probably compensating for something. Give me a break. If you cut out the thousands of words surrounding platform religion, you're left with ridiculous assertions that younger developers are writing paragraphs of comments in their code. Who ever did this? I didn't even do it in Apple Basic in 1989. And what's the nonsense about code density and compression? Crap. If you're writing solid code, and breaking down the problem sufficiently, inexperienced developers can read it and understand it. Even analysts can understand it.

While I've been into programming in one form or another since I first touched a TRS-80 circa 1984, I didn't get my first actual programming job, where that's all I did, until 2001, at the ripe old age of 28. ASP.old was the platform, and .NET was in beta. Being object oriented to me at the time meant being fascinated with things (or things on people), not some kind of code thing. Wrox Press got me up to speed while most online communities were useless.

By 2004, I began writing a book because I felt that the things I was learning weren't being presented in a meaningful way to people who were coming up the ranks the way I was. Blogging was taking off, including on weblogs.asp.net, but the amount of useful content that helped me was not high. And who was I to write a book after really only writing code professionally for less than three years?

I'll tell you who I was... someone who wanted to share the excitement of the learning process with others. Even with my fancy salary, a book credit and some entry level ninja skills, the learning will not stop. I work with someone who is brilliant, and I mentor a few people who are less experienced than me. At the end of the day, we collectively kick ass and deliver a sweet product. It's on time, it's quality, and we're free of the bullshit class system that Stevey spends a ridiculous amount of energy pontificating about.

Platforms and language are irrelevant. Taking what we learn and sharing it with others makes us all better. If these nerds would just put a fraction of this energy into actually advancing the technology and coaching the people who use it, more problems would be solved, and we'd all be better for it. (The open source community, by the way, is the absolute worst when it comes to this. They preach free love and get more bogged down in these "discussions" than anyone else.)

So if you're a code monkey with a blog, ask yourself if what you're posting today helps the art and science of programming by helping others, or if you're just being a blow-hard with an opinion. If it's the latter, remember what they say about opinions. 

6 Comments

  • I read Stevey's blog in regard to over-commenting code, and although I agree one can get overly verbose, I'll relate a recent project.

    In this project, I was converting an ASP Classic web application to ASP.NET. Although the staff of programmers were quite fluent in vbscript, they didn't understand classes, providers, webforms, or much of anything asp.net.

    So it was my job to convert their site to ASP.net and provide "one of each." A membership provider, a gridview, caching a gridview, use of cookies, web.config, a web form, master page, themes... you get the idea. And with one of each, I had to also train this group in what I did. But with everyone situated in at least 5 different states and two continents, a sit down review and code walk-through was difficult. So I found myself doing a lot of commenting.

    For each item, I included comments of what it was, where the link to the MSDN article was, any other supportive links to articles and blogs, why I did it that way, and in some cases what didn't work that should have and the work-around, etc. So with this "overcommenting" they could simply read all about it as they needed to.

    Having spent years working on projects as manager or team leader, I know the turn-around of new developers and the hiring of noobs because management doesn't know the difference between paying more for one good developer, versus paying little for a lot of noob developers. For some reason, they think hiring more staffers is better and going to get the project out more quickly, rather than hiring just one or two really experienced developers whose bill rates are twice what they're paying the noobs. Oh well, that's likely the topic of another rant.

    So being the conscientious programmer/trainer that I am, I do feel it is my obligation and responsibility to provide detailed comments that a noob can understand and learn from. But don't get me wrong, when programming my own web sites, where I am the only one who is ever going to see the source code, they are very nicely limited in comments the way that a good, experienced, programmer likes.

    Nannette Thacker

  • My point really had nothing to do with commenting, it had to do with helping people out instead of bitching about experience gaps while extoling platform religion.

  • Yes, I know. :)

    But you referred to his post in your first paragraph and I wanted to comment on it, but didn't want to sign up for a Google account to do so on his blog, so decided to post on your blog since it originated with your blog. :)

    hehe. hope you don't mind.

  • Couldn't agree more with you mate. That post of Yegge's seems like absolute rubbish.

  • Clearly I should bitch about people who bitch about what other people decide to blog about. That should really please you.

  • Gah, I meant to say "when all useLESS things were removed".

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