Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Getting Feedback On Programming?
jm223 writes "I'm currently a student at a major university, where I do IT work for a fairly large student group. Most of my job involves programming, and so far everyone has been happy with my work. Since we're students, though, no one really has the experience to offer major advice or critiques, and I'm curious about how my coding measures up — and, of course, how I can make it better. CS professors can offer feedback about class projects, but my schoolwork often bears little resemblance to my other work. So, when you're programming without an experienced manager above you, how do you go about improving?"
Contribute to open source projects. You'll get plenty of feedback. Some of it might be quite, erm, 'robust', especially with certain projects. But it'll almost all be useful, and you'll be doing something worthwhile.
It's going to be nigh impossible to get anyone to review your work code, even though they should.
This is unfortunately all too true in most cases. Most organizations do not understand the benefit of rigorous code reviews. If they review code at all, they often only look to see if there are bugs, or if (usually fairly arbitrary) coding standards are followed. I've been lucky enough to work on a few teams with brutally honest reviews. It can be intimidating, but in the end it is incredibly useful for developing yourself. Things like pair programming can also be very useful in this regard.
One of the things that always bugged me as a programmer was that never once in 20 years did anyone ever evaluate my performance on the basis of the quality of my code. In fact, it was unbelievably rare when the person who evaluated my performance ever even looked at my code. Many of my immediate superiors would not have had the ability to judge one way or another, but even then they never bothered to ask my peers to look at my code and comment.
For some reason, I often think about programming teams as if they were sports teams. The way most teams are run, you have a manager who knows little about the game you are trying to play and never watches a game. There are no coaches. You performance is loosely evaluated on whether or not your team wins games, but even then the manager usually tries to make it appear that the team won every game whether they did or not. When they try to get new players, they don't bother looking at the success of the player on their previous teams, or even watch them play. At most they set up some artificial 5 minute drill and evaluate that, but usually they base their decisions on a feel-good interview.
It's quite literally crazy IMHO. In the case of sports it is obvious that this isn't going to work. I'm not sure why it isn't obvious for programming teams.