Steps To Become A Terrible </Developer>
What does it mean to be a bad developer? that’s what we are going to talk about here! Notice that i am not saying what it takes to get fired as a developer, instead i wanna focus on the kind of actions that you might be able to take and still sustain your career, still hold a job, still continue being a developer but just not a good one.
So i am going to share a list of things that i really hope will make you a terrible developer.
PART 1
Perhaps the most critical thing that you can do to become a terrible developer is to always stay out of focus, stay distracted!
And this distraction can come from anywhere really, probably from your email, because that’s the most common distraction that we all have so you can easily let that one slide by but eventually you will get through those emails and there is going to be some important ones in your inbox.
So other ways you might stay distracted as a developer is in endless conversations about anything.
If you have strong opinions or even have weak opinions, if you continuously discuss those with other developers and you never come to any common ground, that will act as a strong distraction in your career.
Now lets say you do have strong opinions and you work with other people who do or may be you don’t even have a job as a developer at all and you want to start your career totally distractedly, then i encourage you at the very beginning to try to learn as many languages as possible.
Now what this will do is it will constantly keep you in the “Hello World” state.
You will 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 are never gonna 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 cherry on top, make sure the notification in your phone are all turned on and now your social accounts are enabled as well so 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 is hand full of more things that you can do to make sure that you become a terrible developer.
First make sure you attend all the meetings if your calendar. Even the once that are optional. Be certain to be present but don’t pay attention. Try to do work during this 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 and actually because your mind is split between two things you are not really giving either one the attention it deserves.
Off course as a terrible developer you shouldn't ever tell your team what you are working on and you certainly shouldn't know what they are working on.
So if you can tune out during your stand up or work on something entirely different from what you say is priority may be, even something that isn’t kind of agreed on by the team to be working on, now you are kind of a rogue developer and rogue developer is one of the characteristics of being a terrible developer.
PART 2
So earlier we mentioned staying at top of your inbox all the times. This kind of responsiveness is typically applauded in the workplace but it will totally divide your attention. So distraction is one thing. most of the FIRST PART of this article is to encourage that kind of distraction. In this part of the article we are gonna talk about a few other things, humility or more like the lack of it.
If you want to become a terrible developer be sure to protect your ego. Now this can’t be obvious. You can’t walk in and express it loudly but instead you should always make other people feel it in subtle ways that you do know more than you do.
This kind power game reminds them that you have a lot more experience than they do or that you just think your opinion is better than there’s. This is specially effective if you can attach your opinions to some kind of very strong dogmatic approach. May be take some of the ideas of some great programmers who are more respected, came before you and justify your opinions by using there ideas.
You could even use this article in particular way. You could use it to build up some dogmatic approach and now you present your dogmatic approach with all your evidence that you’ve gathered, that supports it. Well off course your ego is supported and the other person’s opinions matter less. Often 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, so why should you be thinking about the product. Your strengths are entirely in the logical realm 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 had you to optimize.
But because you are still gaining your prowess as a developer and because you are a technical guru on the team, everyone in the team kind of lets it slide.
Also as a lead developer you have an opportunity in participating in the on-boarding 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 are the alpha here.
These are just a hand full ways in becoming a terrible developer. Obviously i do not personally encourage you to do these things. I would love you to avoid these easy to fall in traps. Off course these things sound ridiculous because of the way i have put these here but as it turns out these are some of the behaviors 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 your self. And as you kind of accept that responsibility i encourage you to really participate in anything that helps remind you of your responsibility as a developer.
Thank you so much for going through the whole. Make sure to follow me here for more related articles in the future.
