Do you know these moments when you:
its trueThere are so many factors that can frustrate developer and hinder him from being productive.
What factors do you experience at your current workplace?
See Also
Messy offices!
I know this sounds petty, but IMHO it makes a huge difference as far as morale is concerned. I've worked in two offices now where my colleagues were massive coffee addicts, and as a result there are old coffee pads, cups, and other crap all over the place. Both times we ended up hiring cleaning ladies instead of just picking up after ourselves, which means that the office is then clean exactly once every two weeks.
Micro-management by managers who don't understand software/web development, and think that you can allocate time for it like you can allocate time for tasks that actually have a known duration (e.g., painting a wall at Xm^2/hr, stamping sheet metal at X components/hr, etc).
I'm in a big company. What frustrates me here is:
Oh no, this won't be a standalone application, it should be a ServletDowntime.
I know to a guy who digs ditches for a living, that sounds luxurious, but when you like the work, you want it.
What bothers me, it's the people who work mainly with the mouth. Everything is always easier with the mouth...
Managers who want precise schedules, when the tasks can't be accurately predicted.
Coworkers who try to overstep their bounds. In particular team leads who think they should have a say over members of other teams, developers who think they need to determine how QA tests a product, and QA people who think they know better than the project managers when it comes to how the product should work.
Lack of motivation in my current work.
I'm always viewing things like StackOverflow and the such to take up time and tasks I'm given seem to take half the time they do other people. At the end of the day, when I'm on client site, it shows bad attitude towards work and not very much dedication towards the job etc.
Anyone know how to get more motivated really well, please, let me know as at the moment I'm considering if 'messages' have inherent meaning (Like Hofstadter proposes in "Godel, Escher, Bach", I believe he's wrong... but that's a Red Herring for another day).
Experienced programers on the team who don't bother researching or debugging a particular issue before they ask somebody else for help. I don't mind answering questions but don't waste my time with something that you should be able to figure out if you had taken more than 30 seconds to investigate.
Incompetence of course! Worst of all, when it's mine incompetence. Yes, that's frustrating.
Working for a big company for the first time after 20 years in small firms (giving away my age here), this bothers me:
Politics:
Equipment:
No roadmap. Programmer are treated as replacable resources.
Ridiculous timescales: Recently we had a spec written on a Sunday that was to be delivered the next day. And I've just been given a week to implement a huge new feature that also requires 2 third-party companies to also do some work. The timescale cannot slip because there is a VERY important (government contract) customer demo at the end of the week. I suppose I should get on with it rather than posting on here, but I'm stuck waiting for the external guys to do something.
Oh, and salary levels... a year after becoming the lead developer on the company's biggest and most profitable product, I am still being paid at a Junior engineer level, despite a glowing appraisal (that should have been a pay-review) and many promises to "sort it out".
Miss-communication, I just simply cant stand it when people ask for documentation or similar, then don't read it, and ask questions that it answers. I could really just pull all my hair out...
Having to go move the laundry into the dryer. I freelance and work from home :-)
And I haven't even started with the actual code yet...
I think negative people who say things can't be done or will take to long frustrate me the most. the UNWILLINGNESS to try new things
In my previous job (mildly large organization - about 500 employees) the worst thing was the sinking sensation that nobody was running the boat.
Things worked out because of the good will and professionalism of some people and despite "management" interference.
People that were in charge for no obvious reasons and complete lack of respect for one's worth and work.
Total chaos! And believe me that that isn't unusual! It is pretty common place!
I like it at my place but as we're consultants we go out and work for others and this is what disturbs me most at those places:
Always working on legacy code and never developing anything new.
Working on legacy code with no testing what so ever.
Using old tools.
I work for a large company after coming from a small outfit, and the one thing at the top of my long list of frustrations is accountability, or more specifically, the complete lack of it. It all too easy for some other person's or team's lack of planning or competence to become my emergency. Without accountability this situation never gets rectified, it just perpetuates and that kind of frustration can quickly lead to a complete lack of motivation and the whole 'I love my work, but I hate my job', mentality.
Hiring a professional developer, but then not taking their advice.
"Oh sure, some random admin from another part of the company knows more than you do about web usability."
Salary levels and position based on years of "experience" rather than demonstrated skill.
Marketing people showing up in the lab in the Friday afternoon, asking fot three product demo to be ready on Monday morning, 'cause the CEO must go overseas with some new shiny gadget to show.
And no possibility for a little more time (yes, three demo for scratch...)
Predominantly male workplace with only 3 people in their 20s (all guys).
Other than that, everything rocks!
The narrow-eyed focus on software features, forgetting that we're in the business of solving problems, not lengthening the feature checklist. Thankfully minds are beginning to open up on this topic.
Warning management about an upcoming problem - only to be ignored.
Then three months later when the problem manifests, hearing the question "Why didn't anybody see this coming?"
I work in an open war room. Most of my colleagues are great. However, some lack basic etiquette, and it drives me crazy:
A really messy legacy codebase made for nonprogrammers
Meeting-itis
Coworkers interfering with my tasks at hand; showing lack of confidence in my results (no matter how good results at all...)
Several of the "senior developers" at my company (myself included) also do double-duty as "account managers", the direct client contacts for everything from day-to-day support issues to longer term enhancements.
We're constantly interrupted by phone calls, meetings or coworkers that require attention on almost everything but programming.
Our outsourced IT systems are so user-unfriendly that even a cowboy physicist programmer could write something more user friendly.
Not understanding how programmers work -- that context switching is expensive, and celebrating "heroes" who put out a fire rather than those who design the house to not catch on fire in the first place.
17" monitors. What century are we living in? I had to buy my own bigger ones.
I've become irreplaceable. I recently saw four people promoted to higher paying positions. I was not considered because they don't have anyone who can currently replace me. Of course they won't hire anyone for me to train the issue of being irreplaceable never seems to come up when deciding on pay increases.
I mostly work from my own home office, but what frustrates me most about some of the clients I do work for, is the almost complete lack of forward planning or even purpose. They want the latest web site gizmo, but they don't know why, other than they want it.
The loudmouth managers sitting right behind me, who refuse to close their office doors when yelling at someone on the phone. They constantly distract me and then wonder "why isn't it done yet?" (even though they have no technical background and should never, ever, ever make estimates).
OK, I hope this isn't legally binding :-p:-
Internal software only has to work in one situation on one company's computers. This makes it a lot easier to develop. You can make lots of assumptions about the environment under which it will run. You can require a particular version of Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or Windows. If you need a graph, let Excel build it for you; everybody in our department has Excel. (But try that with a shrinkwrap package and you eliminate half of your potential customers.)
Here usability is a lower priority, because a limited number of people need to use the software, and they don't have any choice in the matter, and they will just have to deal with it. Speed of development is more important. Because the value of the development effort is spread over only one company, the amount of development resources that can be justified is significantly less. Microsoft can afford to spend $500,000,000 developing an operating system that's only worth about $80 to the average person. But when Detroit Edison develops an energy trading platform, that investment must make sense for a single company. To get a reasonable ROI you can't spend as much as you would on shrinkwrap. So sadly lots of internal software sucks pretty badly.
The other problems pretty much stem from this one. I also feel rather trapped in internal software atm too. :'-(.
working hours: from 9 to 5 instead of 8 to 4. when you get back home it's really late
Lack of basic organization. For example, not being able to plan a three hour session for a talk by an expert. Not organizing work streams relative to release schedules, not using the perfectly adequate bug tracker.
Working for a very large company that is unwilling to buy decent hardware... as a software dev i have a PC on my desk that is the same spec as everyone else in the company.... and 2nd monitor? Not a chance.
Multi-location. I am supposed to be responsible for the technology and architecture of four teams in three locations (in three different countries). FFS.