I am in a tech lead role and my developers get stuff right most of the time. How do I communicate to them thier value to me? (I.e. they have value because I do not have to go through and point out mistakes which means I do not have to watch them like a hawk which frees me to do more useful things). In summary For doing the mundane wel...
I have a dev, that will get around our code coverage by writing tests that never fail. The code is just atrocious, but the tests never catch it because they assert(true). I code review, but I can't do everyones work for them, all the time. How do you get people like this motivated to make good software? Is there a build plugin for det...
Guess you know what I mean? Your boss read this article about a certain shiny new and fancy technique like e.g. Ajax and is now an expert in everything related to it. He now wants to use this cool new thing on nearly everything.. What now? How do you avoid this kind of stuff? ...
You read the best blogs, follow the new trends and, from time to time, you find something that is worth trying. You try it. You like it. You know it's a good idea. You want to adopt it. But your boss doesn't even know about the new thing because he only reads those mainstream slow-to-catch-up magazines. You are sure that you found a goo...
Being a passionate developer, I'm sometimes amazed when people in the industry have not heard about key technologies, news stories, new sites, development podcasts, etc. Does not reading RSS feeds, listening to podcasts, or following key Twitter users indicate that a person is not passionate about their occupation and therefore not the...
After I have a small discussion in comments to my recent answer, I decided to ask community: Is it worth to require strong data-mining skills from employees? I think that ability to quick find information is one of the most important skills now days. Would you require employee to demonstrate such skill? On 99% of programmers in...
This is a sensitive question, hence I post this anonymously. Over the last year, I have been working as the senior programmer for a group of existing and new scripters. This group is lead by a separate lead. I am the programmer of the code's script interface the script programmers work with. One of the new guys has caused me countless h...
I've been trying to learn to code for years now, and the process has been the same: spend hours and hours at it, follow the road to nowhere, switch languages, rinse and repeat. Each time I switch languages, I spend a good amount of time trying to learn the best practices and style of the language along with the proper application of it. ...
We have an intermediate developer who is really good at what he does, but there is one rough edge to this diamond. He's really insistent that every method have only one entry and one exit point. The approach that I'm taking is to not make too big a deal out of it for code that he writes (except when there is a serious clarity issue). Wh...
At work we have a piece of A4 paper with the number of everyone in the office. The structure of this document is laid out in rectangles, by department. I work for the department that does all the technical stuff. That includes supportbear in mind that the support staff isn't educated in IT but just has experience in PC maintenance and pr...
I think you can tell within a very short amount of time in terms of people's problem solving abilities, ability to think in different layers of abstraction, in asking good questions... do you agree? ...
I'm currently hired on a temporary basis at a company to help out with some low-level integration with certain IM services. Their current programmers are all C# programmers relying heavily on that framework, without a lot of knowledge about low-level concepts like the Win32 API, pointers, assembly, and the likes. They hired me because I'...
You working on a project developing good, robust front end applications (because you have done this before). The next project your manager decides to use you for the same type of work, but you know you have strengths in other areas, which you really want to utilise them. For example, you’re hot at writing middleware components or core ...
Recently we added a couple web service machines, and they couldn't successfully email out. We (IS) did not notice this, and the exceptions were being swallowed up and logged, but no-one noticed for about a month. Needless to say, many purchase orders, and retraction of purchase orders, were never sent out for the past month. While th...
On our Scrum team there are a couple of members who crank stuff out to the page without unit testing, then complain when changes are made elsewhere in the code that break their stuff. The refrain is always "It used to work, what did you do?" We are early in moving to Agile, and CI is one of the next things on the agenda. Until then, how...
I'm a developer who needs to improve my interpersonal skills. What resources can you recommend for this? Please no resources about software management; I have no interest in becoming a manager. ...
People ask me this question a lot but I don't know how to answer it :( ...
I kind of lead a team of 10 here at one of the services companies. Being a lead developer, I have been asked to mentor this team that consists of individuals who are programmers but are kind of misfits. It's a mix of pl/sql, java script, html, java, python developers for a project to be developed in Java. Now, if you know the big picture...
Hi All, I am Team Lead for development and systems admin within a small company. I answer directly to the Director of the company. She is fairly difficult to work with as she almost always knows best, regardless of her level of technical expertise. She changes her mind on what should be a priority and consistently comes up with new grea...
Well, the facts : I'm a php programmer (php4/5) and object since several years now. I use to work PHP Framework (especially Zend Framework) At my work, we have to work Joomla for some website. I had to develop components, modules, plugins, and i had a revelation. Almost all users of Joomla are not developper, just users, whom doesn't...