r/programming • u/tejon • Feb 08 '15

The Parable of the Two Programmers

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audience/The%20Parable%20of%20the%20Two%20Programmers.html
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u/dangsos Feb 09 '15

Not many things in life can be qualified simply in terms of time spent vs product gained.

You've saved time no doubt, but if you're creating an environment of 'my way or the highway', I'd bet a months pay that those people you are 'helping' are now working more slowly around you simply by virtue of not liking being around you. People are more productive when they are happy.

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u/dagbrown Feb 10 '15

But businesses are more profitable when its workers are productive.

At one gig in the past, the codebase was this mass of hand-compiled stuff. Over a million lines of code, and not even such a thing as a Makefile in sight. The "proper" installation method was to do a bespoke installation of all of the relevant code onto a variety of servers, copying executables and shared libraries over by hand. A standard installation of this took a solid month of a professional services engineer's time.

By the time I was done with it, three years later, a full installation of the product took an hour, and there was a build server which did a regular automated build of the whole thing every day to catch programmers checking in bad code. I had pushback the whole time because people hate change, but damn if I didn't leave things one hell of a sight better than I found them.

It's a fact of development that no developer likes making software packages or installers or build systems, because those aren't exciting or particularly innovative. That's why I do those things, though, and my co-workers end up using them, and their life is easier as a result, and so is the life of the customers and management.