Dealing with Code Monkeys is Really Hard
I told myself this morning that I didn't want to get upset at the folks I work with any more. I told myself it's a bad thing to do - and it never accomplishes my goal of actually getting something done. Never.
Yet here I find myself, some four hours later, fighting very hard not to be nasty to one of the Code Monkeys when he gets in. The story goes like this:
We were looking into a problem late yesterday, and I believed it to be possible that the choice of Rack web server had something to do with it. We were running 'thin' in development, but 'unicorn' in production. So this morning, I wanted to move development to 'unicorn', and see if I could reproduce the problem in development.
I look at the git repo and see that another developer had made these changes already. Well… some of the changes. He didn't remove the 'thin' gem from the gemset, and that needed to be done. And he didn't document how to start the 'unicorn' server other than the fact that there's a Procfile in the root of the project.
There is a place on the GitHub README.md for how to start this, and he hadn't changed a thing. So I figured a little googling might help out.
The only thing I could find was that a gem called 'foreman' uses a Procfile and it looks about the same, but we don't have 'foreman' in the Gemfile, so I can't see how he's using it. Unless he installed it globally and didn't update the docs to reflect that.
And, of course, he's not in and it's 8:40 am.
It's this kind of thing that really drives me crazy. They make a change - commit to master and don't update the docs. They either don't think it's important, or that it's clearly obvious, or that they are just plain forgetful. But for whatever the lack of discipline, they are now blocking me from working. That's pretty annoying.
If it were 10:00 pm, and I wanted to do a little late-night coding, I could see that. It's off-hours, and he's got time to get it ready. But they all know that we have the rules about master, and they all know when I get in. This is just having no discipline about what you're doing.
It's very hard for me to maintain a calm exterior when I see this around me all the time - every day. I don't think a one of these Code Monkeys takes this project seriously, and maybe that's OK for them. But when I'm constantly having to bust my hump for deadlines for this entire group, and getting so little help as this, it's really hard to not get angry at them.
This isn't calming me down… I had hoped that it would, but it's not. Gotta just stop writing then...