Thursday, June 23, 2016

Do experienced developers have to learn?

Just recently I’ve had the not so nice experience of ignorance presented publicly. There has been a session on software engineering a colleague and I compiled for our department. The narrative was around extensible architecture a topic that would need some promotion round here as we are faced with a bunch of legacy code.

Virtually no-one showed up. Afterwards I figured that they were too busy or just not convinced that a topic like this would apply to them for they are experienced developers with some 10, 15 or even 20 years of experience in corporate software development. They just know how to code.

How did actually write all this legacy code, then? I wonder.

What happens here is a nice little mistake: experience == knowledge applicable

This is no new situation to me. I’m faced with claims like that all the time. Just like a UI developer once told me that she would not provide any mock ups for the team to discuss and commit to for she would be an experienced UI developer who knows how to build UIs for years. Again a manifestation of experience outweighs everything else.

What’s wrong with a developer so convinced and self-assured that he would give a statement like this?

Basically nothing when it comes to self-esteem. Basically everything when it comes to the ability and will to learn to progress in ones skills and abilities.

The guys giving these statements were the ones that showed only little impulse to question themselves to reflect on their skills and how they fit to the needs. It definitely has consequences when a skilled procedural programmer tries to use her skill on an object oriented language and environment. This would result in a legacy code base that is not extensible, supportable or testable, as could be observed in our code base.

Why does some otherwise intelligent person fail to see this difference? Do they really not see the difference? Or is there something else?

I didn’t come to a conclusion about this yet. My hypothesis circles around uncertainty, fear of loss of control, self-betrayal and plain ignorance.

Thinking about being in the situation of having 20 odd years of experience in software development (which I have) and considering myself an expert (which I do) and someone not even working in my problem domain coming around trying to tell me how to do things differently (which I basically did) I guess I would have and show my objections to that person.

In the end this person would question me. The expert. Would basically say I did something less optimal and perfect than I would consider it myself to be. I could imagine myself not giving a damn about this. I just would not feel comfortable with admitting my work over years has been less than excellent.


Switch back. While this feelings are just and cannot be ignored there has to happen something to improve the code quality, the design. In my opinion the admittance of less than optimal work, the admittance of failure would be to closely related to failing as a person, to closely related to not getting the bonus granted by the boss. The culture of failure needs to be there. A culture where making and admitting a failure would be understood as a learning opportunity. A culture where there is no need for a never failing expert who tells everybody who things are handled here and who has to approve any idea. We need a culture where true expertise shows itself in the experience that everyone will make mistakes and the simple thing that one single person could not know everything. Even an experienced expert level developer could learn something from a complete newbie every now and then. 



Read also:

On Coaching Agile - What I've learned from being an agile coach
On Sporadics - How to deal with intermittent tests in continuous delivery
On Agile Testing - Do we need testers?



The opinions expressed in this blog are my own views and not those of SAP