Coding Off Days!!!

[Diestl]

"communicators" like to have meetings and meetings about meetings and waste time and money doing so.

I have been in a situation were there was 3 teams of PM's - one in the UK, one their IT outsourcer and one team in India.

12 PM's spent 9 months writing up requirments and having meetings.

This must have cost a fortune.

In the end they bought from a 4th party with a few customisations.

I don't know why PM's suck up to companies and try to convince them they have business skill when the company views them as project police only.

Yes I agree, seen these many times, decent pms and developers would have it implemented in that time.

[Diestl]

Dim talking sense.

Diestl and anyone like him = code monkey cowboys

Another great debater in our midst . Look at some of the greatest software ever written and some of the major feck ups that over ran and resulted in millions of wasted money. eg, Linux vs NHS computer system. One was written by a very talented programmer(s) the other was probably written by 100 Project managers and mediocre programmers.

Try and give some more substance this time to your response.

[OrangeHopper]

I'm getting quite confused here. Not unusual.

Super coders. What are they?

According to Dim they are sit-in-the-corner-talking-to-nobody-writing-obscure-unmaintainable-systems types.

Sorry, but good coders are also good designers, moderately good communicators and know the value of sharing ideas. Really good ones also know how to code for the future of a product.

One of the best managers I ever met knew this and made sure his team contained good coders who could be left to produce a quality product. He was kept in the picture but his main purpose was to manage his managers. This was appreciated and rewarded by a the support and effort afforded him by his "coders". He also got the promotions he deserved because his teams worked and delivered.

[Francko]

Sorry, but good coders are also good designers, moderately good communicators and know the value of sharing ideas. Really good ones also know how to code for the future of a product.

Why are we all making categories and stereotypes here? There are good coders with good communications skills and all the possible matrix combinations. Unfortunately, there are very few ideal candidates so somehow companies need to get along also with people of not much communication level. A good PM should understand that and be able to leverage everybody's skills, not just pointing fingers and label them as "code monkeys" - what you are doing right now. Some are better at design, some are better at coding. Everybody has a different talent. Sure, perfection is the best thing to have but unfortunately it doesn't belong to this world and you have to accept that hardly you'll find someone with all the skills.

[DimPrawn]

Getting back to the point.

Code reviews are good - no one person knows it all, thinks of all the possible pitfalls, or is without making a silly mistake.

Code that is easily understood by peers in the industry is much preferred to what I will call "super code", that only the original coder can really fathom.

Design, API, coding and naming standards are there for a reason. Follow them.

It doesn't require a "meeting" to review code. We are living in the 21st century, code can be reviewed using powerful tools, email, instant messaging etc.

Supporting and enhancing a product over its lifetime costs far more than development, therefore code for maintainability. It's the No.1 cost factor.

Testing up front using NUnit of equivalent is a must have. Otherwise changes break modules that worked and it doesn't get picked up until formal testing, which costs a lot of money. Code that fails unit tests should not be in any build.

Crikey, all this is (and more - it's called quality) well known in blue chips IT companies. God knows where you buggers hack your Linux kernals for cash.

[AtW]

Last time (~2000) my code was peer-reviewed I got a lot of ***t about not using tabulation of any kind in my Perl scripts...

[DimPrawn]

And look at you now. Unemployed.

[OrangeHopper]

At a blue chip IT company.

Right, enough of this, I've got some code to hack.

[MarillionFan]

Sometimes you have days where you can write a weeks worth of code, other days you can spend 4 hours staring blankly at the screen and everything you write is gibberish. The idea is to make the good days worth outnumber the bad.

Permies are normally the other way around.

[Churchill]

Comment on my code and loose a body part. Your choice which.

Grow up.

and it's "lose"