

You’re a Bad Programmer, Really? - Uchikoma
http://codemonkeyism.com/bad-programmer/

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dasil003
This article is selling snake oil. He cites 3 major causes of failure in large
projects: "wrong estimation", "wrong status updates", and "wrong way of change
management". Then:

 _> You’ve guessed it, Scrum adresses all of these resulting in 99% – 100% on
target delivery. So it’s not due to bad programmers if an agile process can
fix this._

At that moment I was tempted to perform a violent facepalm. He cites these
issues as if a large project is just a five-person team sitting in a room
failing basic communication. These aren't even straw men, they're more like
paper dolls in a forest fire.

The obvious difficulty in managing >$10m projects is gathering and
coordinating requirements, and distilling out from that workloads that can be
implemented by individual programmers. This is a monumental problem. I'm
guessing the majority of large projects never even come close to having an
internally consistent spec without logical conflicts. The problem is that for
software of this complexity it is impossible for any one person to have
visibility into the whole scope of the project.

In order for projects of this scope to succeed what you need is several levels
of extremely talented management with good technical sense in order to allow
requirement conflicts to travel across team boundaries efficiently, and to
make sure that the right domain experts can be brought into to correctly solve
any conflicts that do come up.

To simply parrot the name of some agile methodology and then claim 99% success
is an embarrassing display of ignorance for someone with ostensibly decades of
experience.

~~~
stuhacking
Good points. There does seem to be a trend for articles to have a theme of: "X
is bad, embrace it." (Although, a lot of the time this is simply intended as
irony, it can still be misinterpreted by a reader.)

In my humble opinion, the positive take away of this article is rejecting that
mantra and focusing on becoming better.

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trev0r
I think the author missed the point of Richardson's article. It's not about
just accepting that you're a "bad programmer" and calling it a day, it's about
accepting your limitations and constantly trying to improve your abilities and
the tools you use. I think both of these guys are arguing for the same thing -
don't get complacent.

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christkv
I also read the original article as meaning that you should be humble about
your skills and acknowledge to yourself that you might not be the rockstar
developer your pretend you are. Less posturing and more knowledge that's what
I want.

The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing (Socrates)

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daleharvey
completetely missed the point of the original post, it looks like he just got
insulted by its premise without reading it or at least figuring out what it
was supposed to convey

