Yeah I mean obviously the technical points here are correct (and I wish my colleagues would write more robust code with less Bash and regex all over the place), but I don’t know why he thinks you need an asshole manager to deliver that message.
Over-engineered. Too many moving parts. Refactor.”
That was it. No “nice work.” No “good attempt”. Just a hard stop.
Uhm yeah, would writing “good attempt” have hurt? Obviously not. He could easily have been nice and still deliver the technical information.
Good attempt, but I think this is too over-engineered with too many moving parts. For instance x y z would be simpler to maintain, and a b c isn’t robust to 1 2 3 for example.
It doesn’t take much. Don’t be a dick.
I stopped coding for myself and started coding for the next person who’d touch my codebase.
Yeah. The worst code is the code only one person can work with. Sucks if that person is no longer working at the company.
There are maybe three sentences worth of content.
Wrapped.
In stutters.
That make.
It.
Super hard.
To read.
It drives me nuts on LinkedIn; it’s sad to see it’s made the jump to “longform” on substack.
Everything the author describes can still be accomplished by being diplomatic and understanding without being confrontational and direct. Plus, you build a better, more resilient team that way.
I’m not really sure the author learnt what he thought he learnt.
I think his conclusion was the same as yours. He learned the engineering lesson and added the human skills.
What’s the alternative to being direct? Being indirect? Dropping hints? Spreading a rumor?
Being direct is good. But ‘too complex, refactor’ as an explanation is just one word longer than ‘fuck off’. You need to explain in detail why the solution is bad and which parts should be changed, in this case it just shows that the reviewer did not actually read the code.
The problem there is not the directness, but the terseness. This is something I had to learn myself, and fortunately was able to get feedback from colleagues who appreciated my directness and wanted more elaboration.
