The Retrospector

I recently read an article by The Curmudgeon Coder that kinda hit home for me in some respects. I can’t agree with everything said in the article, but the 5 reasons stated on why he’s a “Curmudgeon Coder” sort of made me laugh, so I suppose I can at least relate to a lot of what he said regardless of whether I agree entirely or not.

Here’s the 5 reasons he’s a curmudgeon coder:

1. Unnecessary meetings, i.e. SinkHoles of Evil
2. Coding is becoming simpler
3. XML
4. The coders aren’t in charge anymore
5. Fixing the affect of the defect, not the cause of the defect

The list itself isn’t very explanatory. The comments made to describe each one is where the meat of the article is. I thought I’d go ahead and share my thoughts on each topic anyway.

Meetings

I can relate to being forced to sit in unnecessary meetings quite well. I’ve been exposed to very large corporate environments where I simply couldn’t get around at least 1-2 meetings a day with people I hardly interacted with at all. The key is to only make time for the meetings where it really matters that you have something to add or gain from. If you’re not getting anything out of it, and you’re not really adding any value…don’t go. Easier said than done for some, but I’ve found my days far more productive when I simply stopped going to meetings that didn’t seem to add value to my workload or deadlines in any way.

Coding is becoming simpler

He’s referring to the fact that coding has left the arena of bit-shifting and pointer & memory management being part of programming and is moving more toward a framework-based and more automated environment where more and more people are able to make things work with less effort and training. I’ll certainly agree with this point almost entirely. I think it’s very easy for those that think they’ve got a handle on things to fall apart and make big mistakes if they don’t have the fundamentals down though. There’s something to say for the people that not only understand how to use the frameworks, but also know how the framework works under the covers in case something doesn’t go perfectly right the first time around.
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