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Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer?

Posted by Soulskill on from the become-a-complacent-manager-instead dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Next year will be the start of my 10th year as a software developer. For the last nice years I've worked for a variety of companies, large and small, on projects of varying sizes. During my career, I have noticed that many of the older software developers are burnt out. They would rather do their 9-5, get paid, and go home. They have little, if any, passion left, and I constantly wonder how they became this way. This contradicts my way of thinking; I consider myself to have some level of passion for what I do, and I enjoy going home knowing I made some kind of difference.

Needless to say, I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager who is difficult to deal with on a technical level. He possesses little technical knowledge of basic JavaEE concepts, nor has kept up on any programming in the last 10 years. There is a push from the upper echelon of the business to develop a new, more scalable system, but they don't realize that my manager is the bottleneck. Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices, but he doesn't get it and often times won't budge. I'm starting to feel the effects of becoming complacent. What is your advice?

15 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. risk something by bugs2squash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Design a system or an improvement to a system, argue that it should be used. Defend your ideas. Stop depending on your manager to put your ideas forward. That should solve the problem one way or another. You'll either be up to your eyeballs in responsibility for a project or out on the streets pretty rapidly I should think.

    --
    Nullius in verba
    1. Re:risk something by pspahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The last time I did this, I was labeled "toxic".

      Best severance envelope ever.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  2. Various methods exist... by Bloke+down+the+pub · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... just make sure you have an alibi. Ideally, make it look like an accident - but don't try anything too clever. Otherwise some cop will get a gut feeling or a hunch and the minute he's officially taken off the case you're toast.

    --
    It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
    1. Re:Various methods exist... by vux984 · · Score: 5, Funny

      but don't try anything too clever. Otherwise some cop will get a gut feeling or a hunch and the minute he's officially taken off the case you're toast.

      You know it. And from watching things like Bones and CSI:Miami I know that not only do they investigate every case like its the only thing they have to do with their time, but that money is also generally no object. And if you are really unlucky, the laws of physics will turn out to be fairly flexible to.

  3. Business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >Our team is constantly trying to get him to agree on software industry standards/best practices,
    Maybe your team is full of snot-nosed upstarts trying to push the latest fad techniques on him, and he doesn't see things your way.
    Maybe not. But I'm only hearing one side of the story.

    If your way really is better, maybe it's better to have him replaced.

    1. Re:Business by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, here's the thing about being complacent.

      If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Software isn't always better because it's new. Procedures either. I'm not about to have anybody use Ruby, just because some 20-something new hire things it's cool. And while I like Agile, I know that it works only because the team meets every day, forces them to track real progress vs estimates, measures what's happening in real time and basically keeps their eye on the ball. Stuff I was doing about a decade before the word, "agile" existed.

      So, color me unimpressed by Powershell, Agile, objective C, json and Azure. These technologies are neat and sometimes useful, but ONLY if they solve a problem and/or IMPROVE something - a test many new technologies fail, pathetically (e.g. 100 lines of powershell to do what one line of "NET USE xxxx" does).

      --
      Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
    2. Re:Business by dlingman · · Score: 5, Informative

      And since when is Obj-C new? It's been out for 31 years now...

    3. Re:Business by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Umm... JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design. Without it, the Web would still be a pretty static place.

      Judging by the number of broken web sites I've seen lately, we could use a bit more staticness and a bit less dynamicness. :-}

      ...laura

    4. Re:Business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm 55, 25yrs experience, I've been the boss and don't want to do it again, I work my contracted 8hrs because my employer is a mega-corp, not a charity. I may look burnt out to a 20-something but I certainly don't feel it. My main gig is looking after the large cvs repository and automated build process I was hired to build ~10yrs ago. I've learned a whole bunch of scripting languages and tools in those 10yrs and forgotten a whole lot more. I make a comfortable living being the grumpy old fart sitting on the code repository, my pay is roughly twice the national full time average but still 10's of thousands less per annum than in the the late 90's.

      Over the years I've observed that workload is like used disk space, it rapidly expands to fill the available hours. If you habitually work 12-16hr days when paid for 8 it becomes an expectation to the point where the boss will sometimes complain if you cut back to the contracted 8. If you work 8 and occasionally stay back to put out a serious fire, you are invariably thanked for the extra effort (and won't burn out so quickly). Doesn't matter who the boss is, this almost universal behaviour seems to be one of those strange social quirks we humans posses. Basically if you act like a "whore" people will (subconsciously) treat you like one.

      Besides, I didn't go to uni so that I could earn the same HOURLY rate as the factory shift work I was leaving behind.

  4. 2 options by greywire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Use your passion to either:

    A) Leave.

    B) Or take over.

    Well of course there's a third option: stay and have your soul crushed. But who would choose that?

    --
    -- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
  5. Truly an unanswerable question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "I'm young and enthusiastic, and can't understand how older people aren't as young and enthusiastic as me."

  6. Embrace the burnout by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Accept the burnout with open arms. Embrace it. Know it and love it. Take your other 16 hours per day and do things that profit you instead of your task masters.

  7. Not necessary complacent... by ageoffri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've got almost 20 years in IT, mostly in various aspects of security. I don't consider myself complacent at all, but at the same time I'd much rather work the 9-5 M-F then put in lots of hours. In my 20's I thought that the more hours you worked, the more it showed the company that you were valuable. Sure I got top ratings but I was only focused on my career. These days I consider it a source of pride that my overtime for last year was less than 10%. I'd rather spend time with my wife, with my friends, doing things that are fun. I stopped working to work and now work to enjoy life. I'm so much happier and the hours I put in our more productive, after about 10 hours pretty much everyone is better off calling it a day.

    --
    -- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
    1. Re:Not necessary complacent... by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I grew up watching my father leave for work at 5am, come home at 6pm with a stack of work, do work at nights, and do more work on the weekends. His excuse was that his bosses saw him producing a certain level of output and he needed to keep it up. He's retired now. Do you know what all that extra work got him? Laid off when someone else with better connections wanted his job.

      When I first started my job, I made it clear that I wasn't going to do this. I'm willing to remote in if there's a problem that can't wait until morning, but that's the exception, not the rule. I get into work at 8am, leave at 4:30pm, and stop thinking about work the minute I leave the doors. Granted, I love what I do - web development - so I'll often freelance or work on my own stuff on the side, but that's my choice. I'll also put that stuff on the side to teach my boys how to ride their bikes or to watch Doctor Who with them.

      I enjoy my job, but part of what keeps me enjoying it is that I don't let it take over my life.

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  8. You _already_ have the answer ... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > I think I am starting to see the effects of complacency. In my current job, I have a development manager

    Why do you think the Peter Principle and Dilbert Principle got coined? :-)

    Programmers become 9-to-5'ers because of cynicism and pessimism. Why do your best effort when your project is just cancelled in one year because management doesn't understand "what business solution it provides" ??

    Companies constantly fail to learn that it not only important to motivate people, it is extremely important to NOT de-motivate people.

    There are 2 really insightful comments from last year which perfectly explain why older programmers become cynical:

    http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

    "> What he's saying is that Apple has an actual functional internal milestone systems
    Exactly. Look, Apple designers have to come up with just as many bad ideas ad the Philips designers, but at Apple, they get killed of early. At Philips, they spend resources pulling those bad ideas along until they're almost ready to ship, and then decide which will die. It means most of the development cycle is a farce, and if the engineers/designers know there's a 90% chance that the thing they're working on will never be manufactured, it means you're not going to get their best, most serious effort.

    If you find managers who can actually identify the best ideas when they're in an unfinished, formative state, then you can focus a lot more of your 'make this the best possible widget' energy on the good ideas and waste less time putting round corners on internet-connected razor blades."

    and

    "The big difference between Philips and Apple isn't whether projects are killed earlier or later.

    The difference is how the projects come to be and reach these milestones.

    Philips uses a "technology platform" system, or at least did during the time Tony was there. I don't know what they use now. That means someone in a technology division at the company develops a technology. Then they develop some platforms that use the technology. They then produce reference platforms or designs that use the technology. Then they take those reference designs around the company and try to find a product group in the company that wishes to ship a product like that.

    The problem with this is that it is pushing a rope. You frequently will make up products that show off a technology but that few people would want to use let alone buy. This system was commonplace with companies at the time. You can still see this system if you look at something like dealextreme or meritline. You will see many companies (barely more than entrepreneurs in these cases) who make products simply because the technology lends itself to them, regardless of whether anyone would want to use it.

    The big difference in how Apple did it, and still does it, is that Apple identifies a product people would want to use and doesn't currently exist or at least doesn't broadly exist in an easily usable form. Then Apple goes out and buys, develops or partners with a company to develop technologies that make that product work or work better. The company then evaluates the product before shipping it, deciding if the product is really something people would use. Rarely does the company have a change of heart about the basic product, but sometimes products get killed because the result doesn't really work in a way the customer would like it. For example, if a product doesn't work smoothly, it may be delayed until faster processors come along. The G5 MacBook Pro was fully developed and then killed because (among some other issues) the battery life was so short no one would f