• maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world
    15·
    1 year ago

    I am an engineer who oversees a team. Most of them can’t write more than a coherent sentence. Code and analyze data, sure, but put together a coherent paragraph? Not really.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      1 year ago

      There’s a weird ongoing thing in the programming world where about half of coders think code should be well-commented and the other half not only think that code shouldn’t contain comments but also think that comments are an indicator of professional incompetence (aka a “code smell”). I’ve long noticed that the anti-commenting crowd are also the ones that can’t write very well.

      • kicksystem@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 year ago

        One way my code improves is by thinking what I need to comment. Then I refactor some and the comments become somewhat redundant.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I was basically driven out of my last job by someone who wouldn’t agree to work with someone (me) who did comment their code. Like I said, it’s a really weird dividing line in programming.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            I am sorry that happened to you but it sounds like it was for the best. I work at a place where knowledge sharing is pushed for. Everyone shares what they know. It makes things so much easier even if we do “waste” time cross training.

            My last job was me replacing the inhouse developer, I got it by demonstrating on the interview that I could reverse engineer his code. The versions he had put into production had all the comments stripped out and he had replaced every variable with random alphanumeric sequences about 8 characters long.

            Shouldn’t have known right there and then what kinda workplace I was dealing with.

    • kicksystem@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      I have had to tell software engineers time and time again that is is totally okay to make error strings beyond one sentence or one word. It almost seems to me that they never realized that strings can hold multiple sentences and and don’t have relevant memory constraints.