I stopped caring...

Last Update: 21.05.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

To one of my last emails reader B chimed in and I got the permission to share parts of it. However, she wants to stay anonymous, which I’ll respect.

As a background. She moved from another profession to being a dev. Still fresh (under a year) but going fine; eager to learn.

Shortened and slightly edited for privacy protection

This sounds so familiar, even though I just started as a developer. Because I have quite some working experience outside of development, I feel like sometimes my colleagues are out of this world. They have been developers for all their lives and they don’t have any clue about what it’s like to be on the customer’s side.

We are writing a document management system and one of our frontenders implemented the PDF viewer. Our tester notified him that it was super slow. His answer? The story was about making a PDF viewer, and it works. It’s not like the PDF viewer is the core of our software. Well, since it’s a document management system, it IS the very core of what we are building. Second, I think you should not be satisfied with something that just works. I think you should put yourself in the position of the user and then he would have concluded (hopefully) that his code can be improved.

Yep, a typical developer is this frontend-dev. Been there done that too. Is this good?

Nope.

The reasons for that are manifold.

One part is we devs. We are focused way to often on the tech site. Building things with new and exciting technology brings us joy. The excitement of learning and solving a problem. And about the reasons behind that we do not care. Customer? Business? Nah, not my job, wanna learn React. Look what I build with it!

Requirements and outer constraints are great possibilities to learn new stuff but as they are the nuisance of having to deliver something. So, the something should be cool or done fast.

Yet, quite often, there comes in another cause. Company culture. For example, if you work in a fortune 500 as a dev, you are hidden deep down in the cave. Devs do code, they are not paid for thinking business or anything outside what they are paid for. This separation leads to alienation, disinterest and probably more.

Want to change something? Have fun dozens of people, who are all reluctant to change because they are basically stuck in the same behavior as this frontend-dev B mentioned. Besides, it is much more complex to change something in a big corp than in a small one.

The consequences are you will stop caring and just do the stuff you are asked to do. Nothing more, nothing less. The smoother you go with the system, the easier it is to have your peace and make your money. For some that is fine, for others not.

Are smaller companies better?

Maybe.

Depends on the personality of the owner and the people he hired. If he’s open and listens to his employees, it might work. If not? Live with it or go.

Anyways, to add a third reason for the original problem. Deadlines. Or better stupid deadlines. I’ve seen it too often that the deadline was already set before anyone even knew what should be done. No requirements, no architecture, design or whatever. Nothing.

The only thing was the fixed deadline and now we all have to work on reaching this deadline. As fast as we can. Requirements negotiations almost impossible. Everything is important. On limited capacity. Nah, we can’t hire more devs, it’s just you eight guys. When are you done?

Now add a dev manager, who can’t say no to his superiors… Wonderful workload :-)

To sum it up. I think it is a combination of many of these reasons which lead to people no caring about what the do. It is understandable, but should be no reason for stopping to care about what you are doing. Everyone needs dev, so move to a place where you start caring.