The Frustration of Realizing there’s Nothing You Can Do
Today has been one of those days that I didn't see coming, and while there have been a lot of good parts to it, there have been a few that really make me want to head for the door and never look back. A long time ago a good friend said to me that one day he had a talk with his manager that used to be a really good coder. This manager said to my friend: "The toughest thing about management is learning to accept other people's code."
Amen, brother!
Today I was once again hit in the face with the reality that even when you give "marginal" coders examples, they're as likely not to even understand that these are the examples they are to follow. No... most of the time they'll google something and see a new library, or something, and read the magic words in their mind, and lock down on that as the solution.
Now it would have been easy to ask the other folks in the group - or the creator of the system: "Hey, I need to be able to do this... is there anything like that in the code?" And get the hint as to where to look. But even that is more than the "marginal" coder will do.
So I had these XML/URL-based data pollers in the code. They worked fine. Easy, clean, no problem. And yet this wasn't enough for a teammate to use. Nope. What we really needed was a Java-based crontab system. Yup. That's it.
Meanwhile, there's nothing these add that the other doesn't - other than code bloat, more dependencies, and a larger memory footprint. But what the heck? Why not, right? I'm sure there's no question of the "best decision" in this person's mind.
Meanwhile, I'm having to write more code to allow for some truly horrible data sources that are sending malformed XML, and poor socket handling on the part of a really flakey web server based on another technology (not Apache or Tomcat, that's for sure).
So once again, I realize that there's nothing I can do. Not one blessed thing. This teammate is not about to understand that what they've done is weaken the project. Less efficient, less compact, harder to understand. They just don't get it - and that's something I can't change, either.