[wellareyousure]

In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team.

I’m not saying he’s making a strategically wise move. But there are potentially another 100,000 developers in this industry who are in meaningful jeopardy over their jobs, because they are truly bad at it.

[prirun]

For original code, might work. But if I'm making a bug fix to someone else's code, which is going to be most of the time in this situation, I'd try to adhere to the style of code that is already there. If it's shitty or I disagree with it, I'm not going to reformat the code and rename all the variables to do a bug fix. A: there's too much risk of me making a mistake and breaking something that works; B: I wasn't asked to reformat/restyle the code; C: what I prefer probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things

[scarface74]

> In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team.

How would you “measure my contributions to my team” based on my code when I spent weeks dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?

[wellareyousure]

> ...dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?

I don't have any way to talk about your specific situation.

If you're asking, "how can you generalize broadly about" what sounds like big company problems. Maybe as this economic reshuffling / contraction continues, I expect those big company problems to go away via "reduction in force." Because if your folks - superior, subordinates, whatever - couldn't figure out a system to get you focused on programming, which is your valuable elite skill, for the last X years, they aren't going to to have the wisdom suddenly to do it now, in reaction to an equities crisis.

And isn't that exactly what's happening?

[scarface74]

> If you're asking, "how can you generalize broadly about" what sounds like big company problems

The scenario I was referring to was at a 60 person startup where I was responsible for initiatives to make us “cloud native” and micro service focus. We were pivoting to selling access to our micro services to large health care provider networks that are using them for their apps and websites. As an aside, being able to scale independently came in handy when a global pandemic happened in 2020.

It was my third job at small companies where I was brought in to lead company wide technical initiatives.

> Maybe as this economic reshuffling / contraction continues, I expect those big company problems to go away via "reduction in force.

What I mentioned doing above, I now do in the consulting department of a little company I am sure you have heard of. I doubt even with a RIF it’s going to go down from being the second largest employer in the US to a small company anytime soon.

> Because if your folks - superior, subordinates, whatever - couldn't figure out a system to get you focused on programming.

I’ve been a “programmer” at six small companies and two F10 companies over the last 25+ years. Well the first one isn’t F10 anymore thanks to Jack Welch’s decisions.

“Programming” is the least important thing. Twitter’s issues aren’t caused by “bad programming”. It’s the lack of strategy.