[ajspencer]

Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common?

My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.

[nemild]

Your view might be from spending lots of time on HN and around engineers? I spend time with both, and I can see issues on both sides.

From the business side, here are examples I've seen:

- Have to use this technology, everything else is old, anachronistic, and unperformant

- System has to be scaled this way from the start (in startups, often, no it doesn't)

- Tension in how you trade off new features with clean code (there's a balance, and each environment requires a diff tradeoff)

- Building feature a certain way because it's easier for them, while ignoring what's appropriate for the customer/user

- Unwillingness or inability to explain technical topics to non-technical audience

- Making decisions solely on technical appropriateness, rather than broader appropriateness for the company (say, availability of other engineers to work on it)

There's lots on the managerial and business side too, but I'll save that for another thread.

P.S. A favorite quote of mine from Chinua Achebe (old proverb): Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Any group we spend our time around will show itself in a good light. Even more so when we are a member of that group.

[rpedela]

It can go both ways. I have seen bad management and I have seen bad engineers. "Bad" meaning hard to work with in this context. Usually the bad behavior I see from engineers is arguing pedantically every little point, not doing the paperwork, unilaterally deciding a feature should be implemented differently just because it is easier for them even though it hurts the product or business. Stuff like that.

[gigatexal]

This. People leave managers they don’t leave jobs. But... people can wear many hats but regardless of the hat can still be jerks.

[brianwawok]

No developers are often terrible.

Source: developer

[chrisper]

I can't tell if there is a comma missing or you really mean that noone is terrible?

[always_good]

With the ubiquity of smartphone keyboards (I'm guessing), I've noticed a major trend toward zero punctuation, especially commas. You have to learn to just add them yourself, kind of like how a Javascript interpreter automatically inserts semicolons for you.

[eftychis]

However, comma placement can usually change the semantics of a sentence. Thus you can find yourself guessing the wrong meaning.

[snek]

s/developers/humans/

[sonnyblarney]

Most devs have no management experience and it's like trying to describe what 'drunk or high' means to someone who has never had a drink or smoked up.

It's trivially easy to 'blame management'.

It's often the case, but it's often not either.