[klodolph]

Yes, agreed.

I think many developers have a vague understanding of how companies work and how their role fits into the company at large. I know a lot of developers who want to focus only on solving technical problems, want to be given the freedom to make technical problems, and want to have the other problems solved by everyone else.

If you’re focusing on technical problems, a ticketing system is a burden imposed on you by management. If your priority is the success of your entire team rather than the success of your own technical decisions, then you’d understand that visibility of your work, your thought process, how you justify decisions, is all critical knowledge that a ticketing system serves to record and disseminate.

I can’t count the number of times where I found a reference to a bug in a piece of code like:

  // Release gadget early to avoid starving froopy pipeline,
  // see bug #12345.

And the ticket turned out to be super damn enlightening. You get to go back in time and relive, vicariously, a debugging session from two years ago by a team member who left the team.

[commandlinefan]

> want to have the other problems solved by everyone else

In other words, do their job and not do everybody else's job for them? Or conversely, get paid everybody else's salary since we're already doing all of their jobs?

[klodolph]

Are you trying to make a point? Could you make the point directly, rather than make some vague, sarcastic comment?

If I’m interpreting your comment correctly, there’s a lot wrong with what you’re saying. First, the “job” that computer programmers do is much more than just writing code and designing systems. Computer programmers are expected to prioritize work, advocate for work that they think is important, gather requirements from stakeholders, make decisions about who holds various responsibilities, document and communicate the process to team members, and disseminate knowledge about how systems work to others. Just for starters.

Second,

> Or conversely, get paid everybody else's salary since we're already doing all of their jobs?

1. Computer programmers are paid generously, at least where I live. One of the reasons we are paid generously is because computer programmers are very efficient at getting work done that may otherwise need many people.

2. It’s not somebody else’s job to follow you around and document what you’re doing and justify it. It never was. It was always your job.

“Keep your head down and just do good work” is a kind of hyper-individualistic fantasy. It’s the fantasy where you’re some kind of powerhouse getting work done in your own world, and you do not need to advocate for what you feel is important. That’s what I’m arguing against. The technical part of our jobs is only one part of it, and you can’t make a good team out of several highly skilled programmers if they only have technical skills.