anonymous-dev

On the bank slip.

"twice as much experience" is inaccurate. I meant "twice as much time" and I am not twice as much productive.

(1) For the experience, I have more experience than some (maybe not twice as much) for the following criterion:

- documented code/api - always seeking to improve my coworkers' productivity (via documentation or automation) - well designed interfaces - fairly on time for deadlines.

Though the first 3 criterion are not really sought after by other devs.

(2) How can I find out my market value ? What are the criterion ?

How does the post "rank" work on HN ?

This reminds me of "Happiness = Expectations - results". You are spot on.

I think I mixed up my personal expectations (as a solo developer) with those of my company. Will keep my work related expectations low and solo developer related high.

"Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not.", can you elaborate a bit on this ?

According to my experience, management has always viewed software as binary world: it works or it does not.

About your last sentence, I was about to but gave myself a reason no to; instead of trying to change things, I simply leave them the way they are and stop "bitching" about it. Either way, I will see if good engineering practices are really important or if a team can do without it (and what the potential cost would be).

Now, my only focus is becoming good at spotting bugs, fixing them and implementing features with fewest lines possible (a.k.a Spartan programming) :)

Will do that.

Are you a single dev or do you work in a team ?

"Rockstar" developers are simply jack of all trade developers with the most experience by far in the company - they created the entire system from scratch. About it being a political thing, I believe so.

I failed to get everyone else on board (even new hires as per my last discussion) because they seems to have already pledged allegiance to the "rockstars" AND/OR don't give a fuck about good engineering/project management practices. Eg: Some have already told things like "I don't mind having a commit fixing two issues at once while the bug report clearly specifies to fix only one of them. I don't mind not raising an issue in the bug tracker about the second bug I silently fixed".

Some managers are former developers who did implement those practices while they were devs but they don't see the urge now. Maybe they know they will not have to fix the issues directly and that might be the reason why they don't push those changes as much. What do you think ?

I did try that and it did not work. See explanation above.

About the first paragraph, that's exactly what I am trying to get going.

About the second paragraph, I 100% agree with this.

I did create this pocket of excellence (myself only) and lead the way for some time. Yet no one notices it and the ones who do, well, they don't care about it - both for junior and senior developers. IMO, the most influential peoples are so called "rockstar" developers within the company and they clearly stated they don't see the interests. I already talked to them and attempted to convince them. I am running out of ideas.

I heard about the Pragmatic Programmer book. I guess it is now time to read it.

About CI server, it is on its way but only for production release. No continuous build for now mainly because there is no unit test infrastructure setup.

About writing test, well, no one uses unit-test for the reason above. It maybe a good time to introduce that and get to show them the light :)

"In some teams you might never get them to adopt the pocket of excellence. ". I am a bit afraid of that. Why ? I have spent some time trying to change things and yet I see little or no effort from others.

What are you thoughts on documenting things ?