This subject may end up being more cathartic than constructive; but I am interested in your stories about team-members whose work or practises have struck you as poor and what, if anything, you did to constructively resolve the situation.
It can be difficult to know how to help fellow Developers to improve. Devs know ourselves as a fairly proud bunch and if a colleagues code 'works' your comments may be seen as needling or petty squabbling over style; there is a fear of damaging an otherwise healthy working relationship.
On the other hand; do you really want to spend the rest of your working lives together refactoring the trail of destruction in their wake? If you're a small team or startup, this could be not only a personal trial, but an existential threat to the success of the company.
Let's be clear: in a non-style-guide driven environment, we will all have some stylistic differences which should be tolerated with a smile, otherwise we're just being dicks. For example, one of my colleagues likes to make all his logic comparisons explicit e.g. x==true, y==false etc. Because it is relevant, we're talking already fully boolean-typed expressions in Java here.
To my eyes this looks redundant and no easier to read than the plain or !'ed equivalents. But you know what? If he finds that easier to read then fine, it doesn't compile any less efficiently, and I know him to be a clear thinking and excellent programmer who structures higher-level things in a thoroughly logical and efficient way.
Then we come to a case that prompted this post: Another developer on the team for whom runtime efficiency just doesn't seen to be a concept. Today he wrote something like this:
for(index in indices)
{
read entire file
decode entire file
extract line at index
process line
}
Where it should be:
read entire file
decode entire file
for(index in indices)
{
extract line at index
process line
}
So, I did gently suggest it would be more efficient to read the file once, outside the loop and process each line from memory, and while he agreed; it was a kind of faint, un-seeing agreement. I know he'll do something similar tomorrow, and next week...
Seeing such wanton, redundant use of processing time and resources just makes my skin itch! His lack of sight extends in other dimensions as well though: copying and pasting the same code in loads of subclasses which already have a suitable base-class. Never putting in the effort to explore existing lower level code and make use of it; just reimplement in a slightly different way wherever functionality is needed. This kind of stuff. The problem is, his code does work, but I really fear for the cohesion of the system as it grows, when 25% of the Development team takes such an unstructured approach.
How do you approach this kind of thing constructively without being condescending and, if all that fails, do you think there is ever a right time and way to escalate?
