It is very easy to think of software development as being an entirely technical activity, where humans don’t really matter and everything is about the computer. However, the opposite is actually true.
Software engineering is fundamentally a human discipline.
Many of the mistakes made over the years in trying to fix software development have been made by focusing purely on the technical aspects of the system without thinking about the fact that it is human beings who write the code. When you see somebody who cares about optimization more than readability of code, when you see somebody who won’t write a comment but will spend all day tweaking their shell scripts to be fewer lines, when you have somebody who can’t communicate but worships small binaries, you’re seeing various symptoms of this problem.
In reality, software systems are written by people. They are read by people, modified by people, understood or not by people. They represent the mind of the developers that wrote them. They are the closest thing to a raw representation of thought that we have on Earth. They are not themselves human, alive, intelligent, emotional, evil, or good. It’s people that have those qualities. Software is used entirely and only to serve people. They are the product of people, and they are usually the product of a group of those people who had to work together, communicate, understand each other, and collaborate effectively. As such, there’s an important point to be made about working with a group of software engineers:
There is no value to being cruel to other people in the development community.
It doesn’t help to be rude to the people that you work with. It doesn’t help to angrily tell them that they are wrong and that they shouldn’t be doing what they are doing. It does help to make sure that the laws of software design are applied, and that people follow a good path in terms of making systems that can be easily read, understood, and maintained. It doesn’t require that you be cruel to do this, though. Sometimes you do have to tell people that they haven’t done the right thing. But you can just be matter of fact about it—you don’t have to get up in their face or attack them personally for it.
For example, let’s say somebody has written a bad piece of code. You have two ways you could comment on this: Continue reading →