Destructive productivity

Post #233,070 by admin 11/8/05 6:05:46 PM Reply	Destructive productivity Good term... what have been your experiences with it? And what can be done about it? Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #233,086 by ben_tilly 11/8/05 7:45:43 PM Reply	Don't think I can go into details about my experiences Just say that at a previous job we had an amazingly productive programmer whose work quality was somewhat mediocre who could not cooperate with anyone. Anything that he touched turned to spaghetti and nobody else wanted to touch it, and he was inclined to touch anything interesting. In one random instance he got tired of waiting for people to write a component he needed, so he wrote it himself. The problem was that he was waiting because they were designing it - the component was going to be used for several other things as well. What he wrote did what he needed, but that's it. And it didn't do it well. You can picture the arguments. As for what to do about it? Our solution was to give him a section of stuff to work on and kept him busy. Nobody else worked on his stuff and he didn't work on other people's stuff. Where he needed to interact with another developer, I was the developer tasked with that (because I could). This was not actually explained to him, it was just how it worked. I'm not sure that was the best solution. But it was the easiest to justify to people higher up who were aware of how much he got done (but not so aware of the issues there were with what he got done). I've seen this phenomena in a number of open source projects. For instance [link\|http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000435.html\|http://www.sidhe.org...hives/000435.html] touches on a similar personality, Leo T\ufffdtsch, who has been incredibly destructive to Parrot. I can come up with more examples, but I think that everyone else has seen them as well. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,088 by drewk 11/8/05 7:52:02 PM Reply	o/ I had the master of cut-and-paste. I never saw a file from him that was fewer than 1500 lines. I never saw one with fewer than three obvious opportunities for functions that instead were done as cut-and-pasted then slightly-modified code. Frequently seven or more iterations of 10-15 lines of nearly identical code. Typical line count reduction when I had time to understand his code and re-write it was about 8-to-1. He was also highly productive ... until things he had written were around long enough that they had to be modified. Even he couldn't tell how they worked. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #233,089 by static 11/8/05 8:10:28 PM Reply	I've seen that. At a previous job, we had some offshore programmers tasked with writing some extra pages. They were masters at cut-n-paste and were thus produced quite a lot of output. Trouble was, they always had trouble understanding the spec, so it need modifying. And we didn't like modifying their code. One refactoring replaced over 250 lines with 10. Wade. "Insert crowbar. Apply force."
Post #233,097 by drewk 11/8/05 9:11:35 PM Reply	Re: didn't like modifying their code Any application -- no matter how well it functions -- that can't be updated is poorly written. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #233,152 by cforde 11/9/05 3:03:59 AM Reply	maze of twisty passages all alike I live with it. I was hired to replace a guy who was extremely productive. Unfortunately, what he produced was bug-ridden, bloated and near impossible to maintain. One site he wrote was called the Configurator. It was used by our customers to configure the product they purchased. The site supported 4 different products in 17 configurations. To add a new product you would copy a Perl module, change the common features as necessary, override various method handlers and add whatever new functionality you needed. A former manager referred to working on it as playing wack-a-mole: Fix something in one place and something would break somewhere else. I fixed it by scrapping it completely and starting fresh. The replacement site supports 81 products in so many different configurations I haven't bothered counting them. I have two more web sites in need of similar attention. :-) Have fun, Carl Forde
Post #233,121 by Another Scott 11/9/05 12:04:06 AM 11/9/05 12:04:59 AM Reply	OT: What's that ^^ ( o/ ) mean? OK? A bowling ball knocking over a pin? A one-eyed Weebl? A Google search of it turns up a bunch of crap (even in quotes). TIA. Cheers, Scott. Edited by Another Scott Nov. 9, 2005, 12:04:59 AM EST Expand All History
Post #233,122 by broomberg 11/9/05 12:05:44 AM Reply	A person waving
Post #233,124 by admin 11/9/05 12:12:49 AM Reply	Raising a hand... Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #233,123 by tonytib 11/9/05 12:11:04 AM Reply	If they're like that, then firing is probably the way If the person can't program and can't communicate and can't work with others, then re-assigning just transfers the problem (and in a small company that often isn't possible). Of course, if they're good at something else, then re-assigning makes sense. We had a contract programmer who met all three requirements, fortunately we ended his contract before he caused irreparable damage, but I'm stuck with cleaning up the mess. I feel like rewriting it from scratch, but of course I can't really do that. When dealing with such code, my feeling is "screw debate about OO design, Java vs Smalltalk, etc. I'd be happy if everyone could just do good procedural programming." --Tony "A bad employee is worth is negative money - and worst case can destroy a company"
Post #233,094 by a6l6e6x 11/8/05 8:39:07 PM Reply	I have seen it in spades. Had a coworker who in a software maintenance activity generated as many problems as he fixed. He was spending a great deal of time fixing "severity one" problems (IBM-speak for customer being dead in the water). He was an excellent communicator, but a poor thinker because his focus was habitually too narrow. Good regression testing was not part of his practice. Besides heavy supervision, the fix is to get such a person a different kind of role in development. Alex The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell
Post #233,144 by tuberculosis 11/9/05 1:46:38 AM Reply	Not to point any fingers but [link\|http://www.palamida.com\|http://www.palamida.com] is a company that makes a tool that audits your source code and identifies open source components and tells you your exposure to various licenses. The company is most of the same people I worked for prior to leaving for France. The problem they've chosen to solve seems important to them because their CTO (I'll call him bob) and their lead developer nearly sank the previous company (it sank for different reasons in the end) because they couldn't stop downloading crap from jakarta.apache.org and adding it to the product (or gnu, or whatever). In other words, they think this is a problem because they constantly create it wherever they go. I worked quite hard to keep them in line but it was a full time battle. To complicate matters even more, there was a fairly clueless project manager who thought Bob walked on water because he got stuff done. It was always the wrong stuff but Bob was incredibly industrious. He can crank vast volumes of pointless code encumbered by dependencies on software with licenses we can't live with in no time at all. I reckon the new venture will fold now that you can buy insurance to cover suits for misuse of open source software. Furthermore, it only takes a bit of discipline and clarity of thought to avoid the problem in the first place. Anyhow, there's one example. I have many more. Successful people must be well rounded and possess decent inter-personal skills to make it. The top software companies are largely built around vision sharing and self organizing teams. If you can't think outside the box (computer), we don't need you. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #233,146 by ben_tilly 11/9/05 1:54:26 AM Reply	Huh, how do they compare to... [link\|http://www.blackducksoftware.com/\|http://www.blackducksoftware.com/] which does the same thing. Other than the fact that I've heard of one but not the other. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,148 by tuberculosis 11/9/05 2:18:14 AM Reply	Direct competitors "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #233,203 by ben_tilly 11/9/05 11:27:29 AM Reply	Then who would you bet on? Not that I need either, but I'm curious. When I saw the Black Duck folks at the open source convention, I wondered, "Why would anyone need them?" They were nice people and all, but I wondered what their business would be. The knowledge that 2 companies had the same idea suggests that there is a bigger problem out there than I knew about. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,255 by tuberculosis 11/9/05 3:17:21 PM Reply	The insurance companies Consider it from the point of view of the client. If I think I may have a problem, then I have two options - take on the risk myself and do an internal audit, or spend money on a tool to automate the audit. Neither is free. Am I safe? Not necessarily. The tool could be buggy or my auditors could miss the problem. Given that this is something I've decided to throw money at, I could just write a check to the insurance company. Now I know I'm safe because I have a contract with someone who will guarantee that this won't come back to bite me. It took no time or effort apart from writing a check. Taking insurance company out of it, I don't know much about blackduck, but I'd bet against my former co-workers if they were faced with any remotely capable company. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #233,274 by ben_tilly 11/9/05 4:22:19 PM Reply	ICLRPD (new thread) Created as new thread #233273 titled [link\|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=233273\|ICLRPD] I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,458 by boxley 11/10/05 11:08:35 PM Reply	well would you define how you describe it? chaos theory, take a perfectly slow running app with dodgy performance numbers, add, subtract, renegotiate and leave the "using" company better off with huge savings, making the ownership company take ownership of dodgy code and slow fixes yet be accused of having an agenda? thanx, bill "the reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is that they think conspiracy means everyone is on the same program. Thats not how it works. Everybody has a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebodies wife" Gus Vitelli Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep questions, help? [link\|mailto:pappas@catholic.org\|email pappas at catholic.org]
Post #233,467 by ben_tilly 11/11/05 12:33:00 AM Reply	My boxlish filter must be broken. That made no sense. I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,530 by boxley 11/11/05 10:02:47 AM Reply	trying to wrap a description of admin's label "the reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is that they think conspiracy means everyone is on the same program. Thats not how it works. Everybody has a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebodies wife" Gus Vitelli Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep questions, help? [link\|mailto:pappas@catholic.org\|email pappas at catholic.org]
Post #233,573 by ben_tilly 11/11/05 1:53:01 PM Reply	It still makes no sense. I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #233,574 by boxley 11/11/05 2:01:08 PM Reply	apologies, didnt notice that the beginning of the thread was branched, I was trying to understand what admin was trying to say as a stand alone post. thanx, bill "the reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is that they think conspiracy means everyone is on the same program. Thats not how it works. Everybody has a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebodies wife" Gus Vitelli Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep questions, help? [link\|mailto:pappas@catholic.org\|email pappas at catholic.org]

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