Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Theres still hope for us non-world-class programmers….indeed, this article (and presumably the book it is talking about too) reflects some of my views on development teams – that they should be structured to create an effective whole team, and that people fitting into the team is more important than each of the members being stars. One of the big problems with world-class programmers is that they tend to have world class egos, not many of which can sit comfortably in the same room.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working with smart people, theres a lot I can learn from them, but I’d choose somewhere with diversity over somewhere with a team full of the top 1%.


Categories: Memories.

/ 13 Comments

13 comments

  1. sciamachy

    Gah! I hate it when you come over all modest like that – you *are* a world-class programmer. You’ve travelled the world on the back of your tech skills, you’ve programmed stuff that makes my brain ooze out through my ears… When you say stuff like that, it makes me think if you’re not world-class, I must be somewhere just above pondlife. I was in the top 5% in the country on the aptitude tests my employers made me take to get the job, but you make me feel positively stupid (though not on purpose) by comparison.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Thank you. But its not really like that – sure I know some stuff about some very specific things, but that doesn’t make me good, it makes me a specialist. Your skills, on the other hand, are broader, which is far more valuable in a fast moving industry like ours.

      Reply
      • sciamachy

        Hmm, I’m a good all-rounder, a jack of all trades and master of none. Anything I’m likely to get into, I’ll probably never be a senior anything, even when I’m 70. That said, I’ll never price myself out of a job.

        Reply
        • neilh

          I’ll never price myself out of a job
          Me neither, but probably for different reasons.

          That is one of the problems with the industry – that it was, recently, fairly successful. A whole bunch of people looked around and said “Woah, theres a whole loada money over there, I’m gonna do that”, without actually bringing any enthusiasm for the subject itself. Without passionate creators we cannot, as an industry, create systems about which users can become passionate. Without that we become a commodity, like electricity or telephony. An annoyance. A cost centre. Not a revenue stream.

          Reply
      • neilh

        Not directly, though inevitably there are more primadonnas amongst the world-class, thats true of anything.

        Something thats unique to programming is that there is a culture of giving what is seen as the ‘good work’ (normally design or initial implementation of high-value or high-profile systems) to those who have the greatest prestige within a company, thus they get to reinforce their dominance over us lower programmers who come along later to attempt to clear up the mess they’ve made before it gets shipped to real customers. If that particular playing field can be levelled then everyone can get on a lot faster, at only slight cost to their ego.

        Reply
        • ex_lark_asc

          That’s interesting, since it suggests that actually the prestigious god-coders actually *aren’t* any better than everyone else. Yet you seemed to be saying they were genuinely better above?

          Reply
          • neilh

            Prestige and god-coder are not necessarily things that go together in the real world, though they might seem to in managers heads.

            There are, I suppose, four groups of people:

            – good with ego
            – bad with ego
            – good without ego
            – bad without ego

            To make a well functioning team (which was where this all started, I think) you need to select a collection of people from all categories except ‘bad with ego’, they’re the dangerous ones.

            Unfortunately non-technical managers can’t tell the difference between the first two, since its the ego that comes over more in interviews that code quality (or whatever other value you wish to measure in ‘goodness’). Depressingly managers are more likely to err toward the bad rather than the good, too, since they’ll prefer people who are less likely to cause a challenge to their domination of the team. Of course, this is a vicious circle since giving these guys jobs just feeds their egos.

            Me, I’d consider myself above average, but not significantly so. In the same way as nearly everyone is better than average driver.

  3. neilh

    Having a good project manager is vital to getting a team like that working, its all too easy to just be going through the motions, doing what it says in the book, rather than actually getting involved and giving a damn.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.