Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Programmers Who Have Not Stayed Current?
skaffen42 writes "The recent Ask Slashdot about becoming a programmer later in life got me thinking about a related question. How do you deal with programmers who have not stayed current with new technologies? In the hiring process, this is easy; you simply don't hire them. However, at most companies where I've worked, there are usually a few programmers who have been employed long enough that the skill-set they were originally hired for has become irrelevant. At the same time, they have not bothered to stay current with newer technologies. They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company, but from a technical perspective they are a slowly-increasing liability. As an example: I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code and cannot be trusted to use a revision control system without causing a mess that somebody else will have to clean up. On top of that, he is really resistant to the idea of code reviews; I suspect he dislikes people he considers junior to him making suggestions about how to improve his code. So, how do my fellow Slashdotters handle situations like this? How do you help somebody like this to improve their skill-sets? And, most importantly, how do you do so without stepping on anybody's feelings?"
They usually have enough business knowledge that they provide some value to the company
Normally at this point where technical skills have faded and the desire to "keep up" is gone, people move more into a non-technical role where their experience and lessons learnt can be put to better use than their fading coding skills. Obviously though if he has allowed himself to become a poor programmer with no interest in improving, he might be just as shitty in a new role. Obviously a paragraph is very little to judge a guy on, but he sounds like the kinda person that barring a major attitude change, is probably going to be looking (unsuccessfully) for a job in 5 years or so when his lack of current skills can no longer be covered up.
...cannot be trusted to use a revision control system without causing a mess that somebody else will have to clean up
One has to wonder what sort of code he's capable of producing if he can't even do that.
No sig today...
I work with a developer who is 10 years my senior, but still doesn't understand how to write concurrent code
Concurrent code isn't new. If this guy doesn't understand it then his problem isn't that he has neglected to stay current, but that he was never very skilled to begin with.
He doesn't understand how to write concurrent code? ...
I know only four people who can write concurrent code correctly. Although, come to think of it, one of them can't write concurrent code correctly and two others I don't actually know. :)
You know, the manager takes everybody aside quaterly, or perhaps semi-annually and privately discusses strengths and weaknesses. If it's urgent there's a "see-me" meeting; but this is a slow leak, so it should be coming up in the guy's PRs. If it isn't, or there is no PR at all, management shares the blame. After having this mentioned in 2 or 3 PRs, and getting no bonuses or raises, it's shape up or ship out. Duh! That seems like management 101 to me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've often found that this describes me, because in the many code reviews I've sat through, I've yet to hear any point that I hadn't already thought of myself, and could provide the appropriate test code (if they'd accept it). So, in my experience, all code reviews have been a total waste of my time, and there was never any way to get past the trivial "newbie" stuff to the things that I thought were outstanding questions that needed answering.
And, unlike many developers, I've often found myself on very good terms with the QA people, because when I give them my stuff, I include a pile of test routines that they are welcome to use as they wish (thus saving them a lot of time).
So I consider at least one of the points here somewhat dubious. Yea, code reviews sound like a good idea. But if they don't produce any new questions that the developers haven't already dealt with, they're a big waste of everyone's time.
I wonder how many readers have similar reactions to the other points in the summary? For instance, concurrent code can be fun to develop, but in practice, all the interlocks required to make it work can reduce many tasks to near-serial performance. Sometimes, though, a better approach is to look for ways to split the task into subtasks that can run in separate processes that rarely interact. I've done this on occasion to produce huge increases in speed. Of course, this isn't really a question of programming, but rather a question of reanalyzing the task and finding a way to handle it with minimal coupling of a set of independent subtasks. But doing this could easily be interpreted as not understanding how to write concurrent code, rather than understanding when concurrency is an advantage and when it's not. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It's really up to the management at your company to determine whether someone is pulling their weight or if their skills are up to snuff. You may have an opinion, but it's best to keep it to yourself. Many people provide value to an organization in ways that aren't always easily visible to co-workers. It's entirely possible the coders who doesn't seem to be "as up to date" in his skills may be providing benefits to the organization in ways you don't yet have the experience or perspective to appreciate.
I once kept what others might consider to be a sub-par programmer on my team because he was a good friend of my best programmer -- the type of programmer who provided 10x the value of any of his peers who complained about the sub-par programmer. Besides, the sub-par programmer had a great personality, broad work experience and helped round out the team and make the overall workplace a much more enjoyable place to be. We had to work through some of the coding skill issues, but as a manager it was a tradeoff I was happy to make considering the other ancillary benefits the person brought.
As a manager, one of my toughest jobs was dealing with the handful of younger programmers who felt it was their duty to judge the value of everyone else on the team -- usually on very narrowly defined terms. Most often it was a case of "the pot calling the kettle black" and the energy invested in pointing out the flaws of others would be much better spent on reflecting upon their own shortcomings and improving their own skills -- which were usually overrated. I can say that because I once was one of those overly self-confident younger programmers myself, but I have since gained some experience and perspective.
Your company probably doesn't send people out for training classes. That used to be common. Today, there's such a programmer glut that few companies bother.
Revision control is mostly a by-the-numbers process. In-house, you should have a short document that tells people how projects are set up, and where everything goes. Has someone written that document?
Concurrency is hard for most programmers. Lately, I've been observing people screwing it up in Go. (Go has thread fork and bounded buffers built into the language, but still has shared data, so all the usual race condition bugs are possible.) What language are you using, why do you need concurrency, and do you need thread-level concurrency?
However I would not be at all surprised to learn that Old Guy is more than pulling his weight where it counts: producing reliable stuff that is efficient, well documented, properly tested and on time. What New Kid fails to recognise is that in a short time, some other New Kid will be sniping at HIM for the same reason he's whining on now.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There are two types of people that create software: Those who care about being good at it and those who do not. Age does not really play a role. Although I admit that what universities do these days is insane. I recently taught a last-year OS class to BA EE students, only to find out that they never had any C, all Java only. Java is unsuitable to tech programming in so many respects, it is staggering. One is that you do not get to understand the machine anymore. Another is that many students have this notion that gluing together library calls is "programming" and they never do anything else. As soon as they have to make something themselves that actually does something, they are lost. Fortunately, there are still people that want to know more and teach it to themselves. But that they are not treated any better when it comes to finding a job does not help, and quite a few of the smart ones do not bother anymore because they see becoming a really good engineer as a loosing game.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This craze for the most modern stuff -- and believing people can't pick it up -- drives me crazy.
I'm the hiring manager for a small (5 people) software engineering group. We use Scala. Nobody in my team used Scala before they joined the company -- they learned (hell, we use Scala because THEY decided they wanted to use Scala). One of these developers didn't even know Java before he joined the company -- he was a Perl guy, through and through. He's one of my best.
We're looking at a candidate now who actually retired from the workforce after being an architect for a while; her last time writing code was 15 years ago. We like her because she has a fantastic fundamental grasp on computer science principles and the passion to learn quickly -- we think. So we showed her the code base for one of our open source projects, asked her to implement a feature that had been requested, and let her loose. She came back with the first version Friday; we'll see how it goes.
Concurrency isn't Olympic Gymnastics where if you haven't been doing it from the time you were six years old and if you're older than 20 years old you have no chance. It's just something to learn. Smart people can learn pretty much anything you put in front of them.
Hire smart people.
You haven't ever been forced to use ClearCase, have you?
The real problem is that there is an idealized picture of an average, competent engineer.
The reality is that the average engineer is barely competent and average companies will be full of them. Any team you end up on in such a company will almost certainly contain a handful of them, and worse will likely contain at least 1 sub-par engineer to boot. This is just a fact of life.
The problem is not being unhappy with crappy help -- the problem is the stupid idea that you should never have to deal with crappy help. I think any good engineer should be prepared to absorb some adversity, whether it comes in the form of a tough problem, a bad team member, a bad market, or bad management.
It's called life.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
No. Taking money involves force or the threat of force. Businesses very, very rarely engage in such things, and when they do, they're usually acting as an agent of the government one way or another.
For instance, RIM has never gotten any of my money, nor do I expect to ever hand any over to them, because they make nothing of interest to me. You see? It's my interest, however aroused, that instigates the transaction. So slick pitch or not, they get nothing. My choice. Not theirs.
Likewise, cable television providers: They get nothing. They have absolutely nothing I want; no transaction ensues. They cannot take; they can only accept what I offer freely -- and I don't.
The government, however, tells me I owe them X, there's absolutely no choice or option about this for me, and in fact, if I don't hand it over, they will take it from me. Furthermore, if I don't have the money they want to take, they can and will escalate and take other things like real estate, etc., perhaps incarcerate me, ruin my working life, interfere with my family... this is what taking means. It's about use of force.
A mugger takes. The decision is not yours. There's the force.
A beggar does not take. No matter how hard he begs, no matter how smooth his "sales pitch" or heart-rending his circumstance; the decision is yours. There is no force involved.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'd call someone current who has 5 years of all of these: Objective-C & MAC/iOS experience, C#/WPF, Android 4.1, SQL/SQLite/Oracle, C/C#/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, HTML, .NET and everything else the Microsoft has. If you don't known all of those things then you need to catch up.
And yet in a heartbeat I would drop your buzzword-driven developer and hire a developer who had a solid knowledge of data structures and algorithms, operating systems and related topics, networking and distributed systems, concurrent systems, testing and strategies for error detection/recovery, requirements capture and modelling and other high-level functions, different programming styles and software architectures, and other similarly general foundations. I'd even do it without even asking which programming language(s) the developer with the solid foundations used lately.
Your buzzword guy might have 5 years with those technologies on paper, but if there are so many of them then probably there's not much real depth there. Sounds like someone who blindly follows trends, and who's mostly "up to their neck in code" in the sense that they copy and paste a whole bunch of examples but never really get into any tool long enough to use it idiomatically and play to its strengths/avoid its weaknesses. I don't buy the theory that a good programmer can sit down and learn any new language in a week -- that's a load of nonsense unless the new language happens to be little more than a search-and-replace away from one they already know -- but I'd rather take someone with solid foundations and have them get up to speed with whatever tools we need on a project than take someone who shaky foundations who happens to have used those tools before for about ten minutes. They'll still be current enough to do useful work with the tools, but their basic quality of work will be much greater.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that having a general awareness and knowledge of recent language/tool/library developments in your field isn't useful from time to time. But trying to get coding time in with every new buzzword is a fool's game, and the mark of someone too inexperienced to realise the treadmill never stops.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No. The majority votes them in, and they do whatever they want; and there is little to no certain connection between what they do, and and what I in particular would have them do. I would not have them go to war outside our borders; provide subsidies to the oil companies; prosecute the drug war; impose rules on personal choice; interfere with the sex lives of those capable of informed consent; etc.
They collect taxes to do all of this anyway, and they do it over my complete disagreement that it is legitimate that they do so. What happened there is that other people have decided to use force against me to make me support their will. That's force. Period. I have no other feasible option whatsoever or I will get hammered.
In the USA, we don't have a democracy. We have a republic. It isn't even the will of the people we are bound by; it's indirected one very effective level away from that. Which would probably have been fine if the legislators so chosen were the people of honor envisioned by the founders; but unfortunately, they are the puppets of the rich and powerful, and so it is their bidding, not the public's, and not that of responsible, honorable legislators, that we are made to do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.