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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

You can’t unless you’re a decent programmer and only when you don’t think you’re 100x yourself

Otherwise it’s insanely hard to measure, bc people will come up with bs about how difficulty, complexity, test coverage, change management, dependencies.

People complain about car maintenance and the plumber, but programmers are worse.. you simply have to believe they’re working on magic… bc, we’ll, you wouldn’t understand right?

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I had a coworker which was the most useless developer ever, not able to do absolutely anything by himself and totally unsure about everything. But given it was a big company it was easy for him to "hide" and rely on just showing up for meetings, talking to everyone, etc.

Then he was the first one to ask for raises, despite he was earning way, way, way more than he should already.

Then one day he came complaining that the mechanic wanted to charge him X for fixing his car and that it was too much and how could that be possible, etc, etc.....I just couldn't believe it.

I hear what you're saying but surely it's a responsibility of the tech leadership (and even the non-technical leadership to some extent) i.e. simple questions such as 'surely it shouldn't take this long to ship a simple feature?' or 'why is everything so complex and ever-changing?'

You don't understand, it's different today with all the micrososervices, packages, toolchain, kubernetes, docker, cloud, security, product management isn't clear, they change too often, it impacts all the code, we'll have to test everything again, this isn't php, compiling takes ages, we need faster machines with 128gb ram, it's complex because we need to be flexible, otherwise it will take ages when we want to add anything in the future, and we don't want to rewrite the whole codebase in the future, we spend all our time refactoring, the ops guys running the database aren't doing their job - that's why things are slow, not because we don't understand sql, the customer always makes user errors and we have to solve their problems, we need to do more peer programming,

bla bla bla bla bla.. It's just bs by incompetent and deceitful people

Hahaha, you sound like my standup meetings XDD

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