“A Bad Technician Is Worth Negative Money”

“A Bad Technician Is Worth Negative Money” is something I said a lot back in the days when I had to go around and fix all the stuff the night shift technician had screwed up. A technician who causes problems is worth negative money because not only does he not do his job, he sucks up the time of others who must fix his mistakes.

Larry O’Brien comes to a similar conclusion about software developers: bad programmers are not slow programmers – they are programmers who are actively counter productive to the code base. In a fascinating post, he argues that the goal isn’t a silver bullet for programmer productivity, but a silver codebase, which bad programmers make impossible. Larry started all this discussion by dissecting the myth of the super-programmer.

My take – he makes sense to me. I’ve had to clean up code from some, well, people who shouldn’t have been programming, and it was not pretty. I’ve seen how a well designed codebase can make adding functionality much easier. On the other hand, I currently have an inherited codebase that needs some serious refactoring before it’s anything close to silver.

Tony

Related posts:

1. The Case of the Disappearing Exception