What does it mean to be a bad developer? That's what we're talking about on today's episode of Developer Tea
What does it mean to be a bad developer? In today's episode, we'll focus on the actions that won't get you fired but while continuing to keep your job these are actions that will stunt your career growth and personal development.
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A couple of episodes ago, we did an episode talking about how to be a terrible manager. Of course, this was done satirically. We don't want you to go and become a terrible manager. If you're a developer, there are similar things that you can take to heart about how to become a terrible developer. What does it mean to be a bad developer? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to Developer Tea and my goal in the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your careers. We're going to talk about what it means to be a bad developer. Notice that I'm not saying what it takes to get fired as a developer. Instead, I want to focus on the kinds of actions that you might be able to take and still sustain your career, still hold a job, still continue being a developer, just not a good one. And ultimately, this will stifle your career. It'll stifle your growth. And much of what you want to do, you may never get a chance to do. So I'm going to share a list of things that will really help you become a terrible developer. Perhaps the most critical thing that you can do to become a terrible developer is to always stay distracted. And this distraction can come from anywhere, really, probably from your email, at least, because that's the most common distraction that we all have. And so you can easily let that one slide by. But eventually, you will get through those emails. And there's going to be some lull in those emails hitting your inbox. So other ways that you might stay distracted as a developer is in endless conversations about your tooling. If you have strong opinions, or even if you have weak opinions, if you continuously discuss those opinions with other developers, and you never come to any common ground, that will act as a strong distractor for you in your career. Now let's say that you don't yet have opinions, and you work with other people who do, or maybe you don't have a job as a developer at all. And you want to start out your career totally distracted. Well, I encourage you, if you want to be entirely distracted at the beginning, to try to learn as many languages as possible. Now what this will do is it will constantly keep you in that hello world state. You'll never really learn anything majorly different between the languages. You might learn some semantic differences of a very small subset of the languages, but you're never going to learn anything meaningful or practically productive by switching between them all the time. So now you have a strong sense of distraction in your day to day work to kind of add a cherry on top. Make sure that your notifications on your phone are all turned on. They're all enabled and that all of your social accounts are enabled as well, so that you are getting those notifications at all hours of the day. Once you have this major amount of distraction, with the time that you have left in your day, there's a handful of other things that you can do to make sure that you become a terrible developer. We're going to list a couple of these before we go to our sponsor break. First, make sure you attend all of the meetings on your calendar. Even the ones that are optional, be certain to be present, but don't pay attention. Try to do work during these meetings and try to split your focus between them. Remember, distraction is kind of the critical factor in becoming a terrible developer. So if you attend the meetings, the external perception is that you are engaged, but actually because your mind is split between two things, you're not really giving either one the attention that it deserves. Of course, as a terrible developer, you shouldn't ever tell your team what you're working on. You shouldn't share that information with them and you certainly shouldn't know what they are working on. So if you can tune out during your daily stand-up or work on something entirely different from what you say is priority, maybe even something that isn't even a kind of agreed on by the team as important enough to work on, now you are kind of a rogue developer and a rogue developer is one of the characteristics of a terrible developer. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk about some other things that might help you become a terrible developer. But first let's talk about today's sponsor, Blue Madora. Blue Madora is monitoring integration unlocked. With Blue Madora, you can seamlessly stream metrics and logs from all of your on-premises, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies to your favorite monitoring platform. You can easily access metrics and logs from over 150 of these different sources and bring them into your favorite monitoring tool, for example Google Stackdriver, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Wavefront or DataDog. You can achieve a single pane of glass that gives you insight into your entire stack. With Blue Madora, you get frictionless integration, no more dealing with open source configuration or managing monitoring agents. You'll also get a visual health dashboard of all of these monitoring integrations and on top of all this, it's free to install and upgrade your Google Stackdriver monitoring. You only pay for the more metrics that you end up streaming reflected in your normal GCP bill. On top of that, you'll get $200 worth of GCP credit. These credits can be combined with GCP's free trial credits when you upgrade Stackdriver with bind plane at bluemadora.com slash T. That's bluemadora.com slash T-E-A. Thanks again to Blue Madora for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So we're talking about how you can become a terrible developer. And specifically, how you can become a terrible developer without losing your job. The kind of behavior that might even get you a raise. We already mentioned staying on top of your inbox at all times. This kind of responsiveness is typically applauded in the workplace, but unfortunately, it will totally divide your attention. So distraction is one thing. Most of the first part of this episode is kind of encouraging that kind of distraction if you want to be a terrible developer. In this part of the episode, we're going to talk about a few other things. The first one is about humility or the lack thereof. If you want to become a terrible developer, be sure that you protect your ego. Now this can't be obvious. You can't walk in and say that you're a know-it-all because that would get you fired. But instead, you should always make other people feel in subtle ways that you do no more than they do. This kind of power game reminds them that you have a lot more experience than they do. Or that you just think your opinion is better than theirs. This is especially effective if you can attach your opinions to some kind of very strong dogmatic approach. Maybe take some of the ideas of the great programmers who are well respected and have come before you and justify your opinions by using their ideas. You could even use this podcast in that particular way. You could use this podcast to build up some dogmatic approach. And now when you present your dogmatic approach with all of the evidence that you've gathered that supports it, well, of course, your ego is supported and the other person's opinion seems to matter less. And this is just the criteria you need to get that raise and become a lead developer. And in that lead position, you continue to support your ego. But you can also begin to do things like over optimize. You are a programmer after all. And so why should you be thinking about the product? Your strengths are entirely in the logical realm and so you shouldn't have to zoom out. You can do your job totally thinking about how to optimize things. And therefore you end up spending a lot of time optimizing things that ultimately the product team wouldn't really have had you optimize. But because you are still kind of gaining your prowess as a developer and because you are considered the technical guru on the team, well, everyone just kind of lets slide. Of course, as a lead developer, you will also have an opportunity to participate in the onboarding of junior developers. And it's your responsibility if you are a terrible developer to simply be too busy to support them. And when they do ask you questions, make sure they feel like you think the answer is obvious. These are just a handful of the ways that you can be a terrible developer. Of course, on the show, most of the time, we're talking about ways to avoid these very easy to fall in traps. Of course, they sound ridiculous in the frame that we've put them in in this episode. But as it turns out, these are some of the behaviors that we end up resorting to naturally. I encourage you to think mindfully about your responsibility as a developer to the people around you and to yourself. And as you kind of accept that responsibility, I encourage you to listen to this show and other shows like it or really participate in anything that helps remind you of your responsibility as a developer. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to today's sponsor, BluModora, head over to BluModora.com slash T. That's BluModora.com slash T-E-A to get started today. Thank you so much for listening. Today's episode wouldn't be possible without our wonderful producer, Sarah Jackson. Of course, you can find this episode in every other episode of Developer Teaat spec.fm. Make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're listening to this episode on. And for those of you who use Mac OS, if you have recently upgraded your computer, the new Apple Podcasts app is available as a native application. Now iTunes is no more, so I encourage you to subscribe to Developer Teain the native podcast app. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.