## Backstage vs. performance
-One of the best pieces of advice I received about comparing ourselves to others is realizing that you're comparing your backstage to their performance. The metaphor draws from the theater, where performers know every thing that isn't right about their own theater-group's performance and unfairly compare it with another person's finished performance. How this relates is that we compare all of the things that we know (the long hours of unproductive coding, the struggles with learning, and so forth) with the finished product of someone else. We don't see their struggle in getting things to work, or their countless hours making crappy prototypes and unfinished projects before making the thing we admire.
+One of the best pieces of advice I received about comparing ourselves to others is realizing that you're comparing your backstage to their performance. The metaphor draws from the theater, where performers know every thing that isn't right about their own theater-group's performance and unfairly compare it with another person's finished performance. How this relates is that we compare all of the things that we know (the long hours of unproductive coding, the struggles with learning, and so forth) with the finished product of someone else. We don't see their struggle in getting things to work, or their countless hours making crappy prototypes and unfinished projects before making the thing we admire. Allow yourself to have a messy back-stage and do plenty of rehearsals and understand that it takes effort and practice to put on a good performance.
## The lure of the post-mortem
-There's a tradition in some programming projects (especially in game development projects where there is a clear end when the product ships) of doing a post-mortem on the project. What the post-mortem does is allow the developers of a project to state what went right and what didn't go right. The better ones tend to be frank accounts of the successes and failures of a project.
+There's a tradition in some programming projects (especially in game development projects where there is a clear end to the project when the product ships) of doing a post-mortem on the project. What the post-mortem does is allow the developers of a project to state what went right and what didn't go right. The better ones tend to be frank accounts of the successes and failures of a project.
The post-mortem can be a fascinating look into the development of a project. I've found myself reading a lot of these looking for insights into the development process.
There's nothing wrong with reading a post-mortem about a project - we can learn a great deal about how a project is run (or shouldn't be run) and what pitfalls to be aware of if we go down a similar path. But understand that you're reading one account (whether by one person or one team of people). They have the perspective of someone deep in the conflict. You're looking at their recollections of tactics, not the overall strategy brought them to the place.
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## Ranking programmers
There are many metrics which folks use to rank programmers. You've likely seen these metrics manifest themselves in different ways: competition sites, numbers of commits to projects, productivity measurements, time to turn-around code, and good ol' fashioned gut feelings. We do it to ourselves and others. We compare our work against the work of our peers and folks that we admire. But that can lead us to make comparisons that aren't objective or based on all of the data. I can compare myself against folks who do low-level programming and find that I don't measure up in that realm. Never mind that I haven't done a whole lot of low-level programming; the comparison is valid. Or I can compare myself against folks who were mentored by programmers whose names are legendary in the field. I will find gaps between my knowledge and their knowledge, because I didn't have access to those mentors (or worse: I didn't take advantage of the mentors that I did have access to. Whoops!). Comparisons like these are unhelpful and lead us into punishing ourselves for not being someone else. We look at our projects and our history and conclude that we're not that other person, nor could we ever be that other person.
The major problem with ranking programmers (or really anything for that matter) is that ranking systems are based on one set of criteria. There is no real standard for ranking programmers. Sites that rank programmers based on numbers of problems solved or difficulty of problems solved have only determined that there are a set of programmers who really enjoy solving these sorts of problems. They've also determined these sets of programmers will spend the time and effort to solve these problems and will be competitive in solving these problems. It tells us little about the programmer's abilities outside of that domain.
-We can find other metrics to rank programmers. One classic metric is reviewing how many lines of code a programmer used in order to solve a problem (this is sometimes referred to as "code golf", where the fewer number of lines of code the better the solution). Or we can see how "clean" the solution is (clean being another nebulous term). We can look at the Big O notation of the code that a programmer generates or how well the code adapts to various circumstances. We can count the number of cycles a particular piece of code takes in order to run and benchmark it against similar code. Very little of this tells us anything about the programmer themselves. What it does tell us is that the programmer has experience that lead them to that particular solution. It tells us that the programmer has seen these sorts of problems before and cared deeply enough about how to make a better solution. We learn that the programmer devoted time and energy to practice these sorts of problems. What it doesn't show us is an overall measurement of the programmer's skills or abilities. It's similar to the apocryphal tale of a brilliant professor. This professor was an absolute genius in his field and was one of the go-to people for answers about his subject. But despite his brilliance he was unable to understand how to change a tire on a car. Does that mean the professor was not as brilliant as folks claimed him to be? Hardly. It means the professor spent more time thinking about his profession than he spent thinking about changing tires. The same is true for programmers. If a programmer spends most of their time solving a particular set of problems they will eventually become skilled at those sorts of problems. But if they struggle with a different sort of problem it doesn't discount their overall skills; it just points out areas they might want to work on.
+We can find other metrics to rank programmers. One classic metric is reviewing how many lines of code a programmer used in order to solve a problem (this is sometimes referred to as "code golf", where the fewer number of lines of code the better the solution). Or we can see how "clean" the solution is (clean being another nebulous term). We can look at the Big O notation of the code that a programmer generates or how well the code adapts to various circumstances. We can count the number of cycles a particular piece of code takes in order to run and benchmark it against similar code. Very little of this tells us anything about the programmer themselves. What it does tell us is that the programmer has experience that lead them to that particular solution. It tells us that the programmer has seen these sorts of problems before and cared deeply enough about the problem to think hard enough about how to make a better solution. We learn that the programmer devoted time and energy to practice these sorts of problems. What it doesn't show us is an overall measurement of the programmer's skills or abilities. It's similar to the apocryphal tale of a brilliant professor. This professor was an absolute genius in his field and was one of the go-to people for answers about his subject. But despite his brilliance he was unable to understand how to change a tire on a car. Does that mean the professor was not as brilliant as folks claimed him to be? Hardly. It means the professor spent more time thinking about his profession than he spent thinking about changing tires. The same is true for programmers. If a programmer spends most of their time solving a particular set of problems they will eventually become skilled at those sorts of problems. But if they struggle with a different sort of problem it doesn't discount their overall skills; it just points out areas they might want to work on.
## Measuring programmer output
There are times when it is useful to compare ourselves with other programmers. Sometimes we can learn about new technologies or new methodologies by looking at the work of others. But it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because we're not at the level of other programmers that we're somehow inferior to them. Rather than looking at other programmers as competition we should look at them as companions. We're all in this profession working to make our respective projects better. With Open Source / Free Software we have a unique opportunity to see how other folks do their work in public. We can learn from the code of others much in the same way that scientists can look at the papers of other scientists to see what worked (and can improve the validity of the paper with replication and repetition). No coder is completely isolated from the work of others. Rare is the programmer that coded their own environment from scratch without the work of others to help their own coding efforts. We all learn from each other. But rather than be intimidated by the work of others we can instead take it apart and learn from it. And if we're lucky we can take the opportunity to ask them how the code works and why they chose to write the code in that way.
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There's value in asking questions of our fellow programmers. We tend to overlook asking questions fearing that we're going to ask something obvious or ask a question that will make us feel inadequate for asking. Asking questions is very useful when we don't understand what is going on with an idea or a particular piece of code. There are programmers out there who don't mind answering questions, and my hope is that you find them. Granted there are some programmers who are very busy and might not have the time or inclination to answer our questions. But if we are truly stuck and have exhausted all other avenues perhaps we can ask questions of them that don't require much of their time and effort and we can both be happy for the interaction. They may even be grateful for the question because it gives them insights into a perspective they might not otherwise have. When we ask questions we initiate a sharing of ideas in both directions.
There is an art to asking questions and it can be frustrating when folks don't answer our questions or come back with other questions / suggestions that are less than helpful. This manifests itself in exchanges where person A asks: "I'd like to know how to do X" and persons B and C respond "I would do Y instead". It's frustrating when folks won't answer our questions directly. It's also easy to get embroiled in exchanges with folks about the merits of doing Y where clearly I had intended to do X all along, thank you very much. But if we re-frame the experience as "this person is trying to help me; perhaps there is something in this recommendation that might be helpful." then we can have a better conversation. Perhaps what we're asking isn't the best way to do something and pausing to listen may help us better understand why they suggested what they did.
Pulling our ego out of the question allows us to be more open to the answers we receive. When people don't understand our question it becomes easy to take it personally and re-frame it as "they're not understanding me" or "they're not listening to me". Pulling ourselves out of the question allows us to take the answer at it's merits and gives us the ability to change the question as needed.
-Of course there are folks who won't respond with your best interests at heart and are only interested in imposing their own world-view upon you. Instead of answering your question they question why you're doing that at all and should be using their methodology instead. It can take a lot of energy to engage with these folks to tell them "no, I really, really intended to learn more about X". I wish I had good answers for how to handle these folks. There are plenty of them that feel that whatever they're doing is the only right path and those that stray from their chosen path are anathema to their world. My best suggestion is to thank them for their time and find someone else to ask. Perhaps they may be useful in the future when you have questions about whatever is part of their agenda, but for now be as kind as possible and wish them well on their journey. Technology spaces have a lot of folks who have been working with computers for a long time and form very strong opinions about their tools and technologies. My hope is that you can find the ones that are also kind and willing to share what they know and not badger you their strongly held beliefs. Over time you too will form your own beliefs on what works and what doesn't work and pass that knowledge on to others. Recognizing folks who are there to help educate and those who are there to proselytize is part of our growth process.
+Of course there are folks who won't respond with your best interests at heart and are only interested in imposing their own world-view upon you. Instead of answering your question they question why you're doing that at all and should be using their methodology instead. It can take a lot of energy to engage with these folks to tell them "no, I really, really intended to learn more about X". I wish I had good answers for how to handle these folks. There are plenty of them that feel that whatever they're doing is the only right path and those that stray from their chosen path are anathema to their world. My best suggestion is to thank them for their time and find someone else to ask. Perhaps they may be useful in the future when you have questions about whatever is part of their agenda, but for now be as kind as possible and wish them well on their journey. Technology spaces have a lot of folks who have been working with computers for a long time and form very strong opinions about their tools and technologies. My hope is that you can find the ones that are also kind and willing to share what they know and not badger you with their strongly held beliefs. Over time you too will form your own beliefs on what works and what doesn't work and pass that knowledge on to others. Recognizing folks who are there to help educate and those who are there to proselytize is part of our growth process.
If we look at other programmers as our traveling companions on this journey; as peers in our coding practice, then we can realize that we're all in this together. Even someone with many more years of experience than you is your peer. You have knowledge and experience they won't have, and they have experience and knowledge you don't have. If we strip away the barriers of perceived rank and meritocracy we can better engage with and learn from each other.
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / blobdiff