4 Steps To Ensure You’re The Worst
Developer Ever!
Disclaimer: For those with no sense of humor at all; this is an exercise in extreme sarcasm.
There are lots of articles about improving your skills as a developer. Everyone likes to talk about how to strengthen their skills and produce really good software. But, what if you want to be the worst developer ever? Nobody seems to want to share those secrets.
In these tough economic times secure your financial future by milking your employer for as much as you can. They’re not really interested in saving money.
Don’t Write Clean Code
Just think, if you write messy code that is hard to maintain then you are creating job security for yourself. The longer it takes to debug and make changes the more money you will be making.
Writing comments in your code, making the code clear and easy to understand just opens the door for someone to steal your job. If it can’t be understood then nobody else can do you job! You might want to keep a cheatsheet or decrypting key hidden somewhere in case you can’t figure out what you were thinking.
Don’t Write Unit Tests
Here is the excuse many of you have been looking for to justify not writing unit tests. Stop whining about unit tests being too hard to write or taking too much time. I’ve got a better reason.
Writing unit tests makes your code to modular and concise. Refer to the point about not writing clean code above. Besides, unit testing will only save you time in the long run. That is not our goal. We are trying to cash in on overtime pay here!
Don’t Read Development Blogs Or Programming Books!
Who needs to learn new skills? Why on earth would you want to do that? Everyone knows that VB6 is good enough and can do anything we need to do. You don’t want to work for those cheap skates that are trying to improve development performance and cut development costs. Nobody needs to use an ORM, you make more money if it takes you longer to write all that code by hand!
Don’t Waste Time Planning Your Application
Get off my back about planning my application. You don’t need to do that, it will just look like you aren’t getting anything done. The sooner you can get a working prototype up and running the happier your client will be. Don’t worry about the future. Your client won’t need new features or find any bugs.
There You Have It
Now that you are armed with this new liberating information, go out there and be the worst developer that you can be. It’s time to put some mystery back into software development!
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18 comments on this post
You forgot “Re-write everything.” Sometimes I find that the .NET framework completely fails me. I also want to solve every problem that’s every been solved again. Loggers, Auditing, Exception Handling, Dependency Injection Containers. If it was written by somebody else, it probably sucks, cause I didn’t write it. Haha…. (I’m kidding too).
Dont have the b@llz to tell your boss some degree of requirements and thinking is needed…
Excellent post! These advices are completely according to the project I have to dig-in now! Someone made such a mess that we’ll need centuries to decrypt it.
Nice post… Reminded me of the classic “how to write unmaintainable code”:
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html
hehe , nice one man , keep up the worse posts
Who could have convinced you to write a biography on former coworkers of mine??
Thanks for the great feedback guys. I wasn’t expecting so many comments sharing how you can relate personally to this.
On the other hand I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised considering my experiences in college. Colleges don’t seem to get that the theory and methodolgy is the important part. You can learn the basic syntax of a language in an afternoon but if you don’t know how to program well you will write bad code no matter what language you use.
Unit test are a waste of time. So either i’m a bad developer or I know business efficiency.
@bloggy, it is very possible to write good code without writing unit tests.
Many people disagree on whether unit tests are necessary or not. So it is one of those personal choice things, unless your company requires them.
I, personally, have found that unit tests reduce the number of bugs introduced when adding new features or fixing old bugs. Without unit tests you don’t know if the changes you made have affected other code without firing up the UI and frankly we both know that kind of testing doesn’t always happen unless you have a QA department.
We don’t use source control where I work. I have to merge our projects manually. In Pennsylvania, you don’t have to be a good developer, you just need to be better than the Amish.
Maybe we can make “Don’t write clean code” and “Don’t read books” more subtle with this:
Discuss about Design Patterns without really knowing what they are for. Let your code follow your own interpretation. If your architect argues your solution, vary your answers, but stay with your interpretation. The limited time frame is your friend. Some days later you’ll allowed to keep your implementation, because it is in a black box and can be refactored later anyway. But, you know this will never become true ;-).
You forgot hardcode network paths using mapped drive letters.
Sad but true, what I got from a guy I used to work with in a few weeks :
-I never use the debugger. I just run it on the command line. The IDE is only to write code -but that’s good to know we code on the best java IDE of the industry. (and that’s not really like he doesn’t need it..)
-I never install the system and kernel updates. What’s the point? (I answer, you know bug fixes, security, stability, sometimes new features). Yes but I’m just developing. Even on windows I don’t install them. It’s crap anyway.
-I never restart my machine, it’s not windows. Hey operation ! my machine crashed WTF?! Operations, I need a new machine, it takes to much time to compile !
-My builds usually has dependencies on the major frameworks of the company, you never know, you might need them..
I wish he had the honesty to say that during the job interview… too late
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