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Closed 12 years ago.
I have been using gvim at work for a year or so, just at the point where I'm loving it, getting the hang of it and trying to j,k all over Microsoft Outlook. Then my computer died. Now, originally I had installed gvim myself, which at the time was a "no-no" and is now is really a bad idea (what with all the people introducing viruses to the network and whatnot).
We have a software review board to which I was sent when I wanted gvim "legally" installed. I was told that the standard text editor is UltraEdit and they don't want to support more than one. If I want to use gvim I need to talk management into making it the standard.
I'm kind of at a loss. Obviously, I can tout the cost savings, but I was having a hard time explaining what my fuss was about. If it were another programmer, I'd just force them to use it and they'd figure it out for themselves. But management folk aren't much interested in not being able to figure out you need to "i" before you can type, er, insert.
I told my manager it was like having a rowboat instead of swimming everywhere. And sometimes you're motorboating in that thing, but I'm looking for concise, compelling arguments which aren't based on bad analogies. There are a number of similar-ish questions, but I fear they trend too technical. Any ideas?
And after all your awesome advice wins the day for me, how do I ease former UltraEdit users into becoming gvimmers?
Update:
Thanks for the answers! I accepted one but took from many (don't know if that matters as question is now closed). Even though it was apparently too open-ended it is helping me plead my case with the powers-that-be.
Seems simple enough. Tell them that you are far more proficient with Vim and that you know next to nothing about UltraEdit. Whether this is true is irrelevant - provisioning requests for software aren't delivered under oath :-)
This has two effects:
you won't need the IT staff to support you since you such a guru.
you won't need weeks of ramp-up time trying to figure out how UltraEdit works.
Managers understand cost/benefit analyses. The cost of letting you use Vim is zero. The cost of making you use UltraEdit is considerably more.
Likewise Vim's benefits are high since you're immediately productive.
The company where I work actually has two classes of software that they let us use. The first is the stuff they support. The second is stuff that you need to get yourself (off the company distribution site, not from outside, they're still paranoid about malware and rightly so) and, if you have trouble with it, don't call them.
But don't make the mistake of trying to evangelise Vim. You want to be given a choice, not try to convince everyone else to have their choice taken away.
gvim is a portable app. So don't install it but have it anyway.
The argument I would use is that individual developers are more productive in different environments and this one doesn't even cost them anything. And, on that note, while I'm a gvim lover myself, I think forcing others onto it is guaranteed to only make them hate it.
To be honest, I don't know what UltraEdit provides that Notepad++ doesn't - which suggests a waste of money.
But, their response seems like a canned "we don't want to do our job so go away". If I were in your position I would present the use cases that I used with vi and DEMAND that they show me how to do the same thing in UltraEdit because they "support" that product. And trust me, I would make sure I make multiple tickets in the ticketing system just to piss them off. And at any point if they say "I don't know", contact their supervisor and ask them why you can't have gvim installed when the techs don't even know about the "supported" software.
If they refuse to help you or take their time, contact their supervisor and tell them they are impairing your ability to do your job.
Eventually someone will listen to you and cave :).
gvim is indeed a thing of great power. Grown men have been known to weep at the mere thought of its beauty. The productivity increases provided by this tool are immense if you know them by heart, and switching back to a conventional editor can make you feel as if you are typing with only your thumbs.
Given this, I would suggest you take some sort of productivity measurement, if you can. For similar straightforward development tasks, measure the lines of code you output in n hours with gvim, and then with UltraEdit. Include tasks such as refactoring into these measurements. Then, take these numbers to management and say, "Would you have me perform at 1/x the speed that I could be performing? Remember, this is dollars and cents we are talking about!"
Also assure these naive creatures that gvim is not a virus and will not take down the network in flames. It is, in fact, a text editor.
Implore them to amend the standards to allow for the application of a little logic. A little logic can go a long, long way.
Good luck to you, roger. As a fellow gvim enthusiast, I salute you.
This question is a better fit for programmers.stackexchange.com. But anyway. I think this whole "everybody at work must use one editor only" is absurd. Whatever happened to "different strokes for different folks", especially for creative types like programmers?
If your work doesn't see programmers as creative types, then you have a bigger problem. Time to visit careers.stackoverflow.com. ;-)
As a personal aside, I type with Dvorak. I don't necessarily want to convert all my workmates to Dvorak, but, I would find a different job if work made me use qwerty. There is simply no way I would agree to retrain myself on qwerty given that I type at 100 to 120 wpm on Dvorak, and no amount of qwerty training will get me to that speed.
Under these circumstances, I would consider going rogue.
I'm afraid you've presented a no win situation that I've faced many times in my programming career - a draconian policy inflicted on productive employees by middle management. A vain effort to homogenize the environment and work force beyond any level that can be considered reasonable.
Ponder the consequences of going rogue, by installing vim on your box anyways, and see if they are worth the benefit to you. If you decide that it is worth it, just do it. It's not like you are doing something illegal, after all. If the consequences are dire, I'm afraid you will have to cave in and start using UltraEdit. It's not the end of the world (it could have been notepad), but as an avid vim user myself, I feel your pain.
Update: I see people are voting me down, but this is the real world and the real world isn't perfect(ly theoretical in nature). Sometimes sacrifices have to be made, but in the end it's still your decision and only you have enough information to weigh the consequences. All we can do is present you with options, some more extreme than others...
Programmers are a very expensive resource, and you are losing productivity by using UltraEdit. Just do a little math:
Suppose you spend 60 minutes a day for a month dealing with UltraEdit instead of programming. Then, maybe after month of adjustment, it only takes you an extra 30 minutes a day to use UltraEdit. Add those minutes together, and you get nearly 20 days per year! This means it costs your company nearly a month of your time every year to use UltraEdit.
Now find a few colleagues who have similar opinions. If four or five of you get together, the amount of lost time gets really big really fast.
Just flip the numbers around, and tell your manager that you know a great way to A) save the company a bunch of money or B) greatly improve programmer productivity.
Whether that argument will work depends on your company (and your position in the company).
The people who craft IT policies should understand that a programmer's computer needs are quite different from those of the average business user.
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Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Business Case for Resharper
I've just recently graduated and I'm working for my first company. During college, one of my professors had every computer loaded with Resharper and I loved it! I bought myself a personal license for it and have been using it ever since.
But at my new job, only a select few (senior developers mostly) are using Resharper. When I asked my supervisor to buy a license for myself, I was shot down because "it won't improve the productivity of level 1 programmers".
I've tried showing them that Resharper is only a fraction of a programmer's salary and it'll make my life as a programmer easier. But unfortunately, my words fell on deaf ears. Is there any case or argument that I can bring to my supervisor to show them that it will increase my productivity?
"it won't improve the productivity of level 1 programmers"
Gotta tell you up front, there's not much hope with people who say things that ridiculous. This is tantamount to saying "Visual Studio isn't worth the cost for junior developers, they can use Notepad.
In my experience, anyone who asks for Resharper (or any other productivity tool) is probably going to make good use of it because they know already what it's going to give them.
The people it won't help is people who don't know what it offers and aren't surrounded by people who help each other. I've been using it for years now and I still keep finding new features that save me time. Even if you're not the kind of person to get all the benefits, in a decent sized project, Find Type and Ctrl-Click alone pay for the license.
I guess you could try that argument. Or you could try the long-term approach - the longer someone is given resharper for, the more benefit they get from it, so why wait until you're a senior and waste that learning curve then. Or you could try the argument that being a lowly level 1 developer you're going to need help from seniors and they're going to be less inclined to come to your machine if it is less functional.
But honestly, I don't see any argument that's going to get past someone who says things like that. I'm thinking the only thing going through their mind is: if I don't invest in making my seniors happy, they leave (or worse, go over my head to my boss); if I don't invest in my juniors, they don't. I doubt the productivity argument has ever washed.
I feel for you. Best advice I really have is that this is your first lesson in questions to ask at interviews when you do move on. My guess is you'll be learning a lot of things about how to spot companies you don't want to work for.
Incidentally, that was part of the argument I made when asking for licenses for my team (which wasn't a tough fight - one email): if resharper does nothing else, it attracts good developers to your company.
If you already have a personal license, I don't think anything prevents you from using it also at work, provided that your company allows you installing it... http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/license-matrix.jsp
Your supervisor is an idiot.
Do the maths: Work out how much it costs your company to run you per minute (your salary, plus all the overheads like your computer equipment and software, electricity, accomodation. You can probably roughly double your salary). You'll probably find that saving around 1-2 minutes per day will pay back the cost of Resharper to your company in a year. So if you can convince your manager that you will save 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 10 minutes a day, you can show him that he'll be saving money in only a few months.
Remind him that with this sort of tool you are likely to make fewer mistakes - especially as you are inexperienced. How much does it cost to find and fix each bug that could have been avoided with Resharper? $25? $50? And of course, using Resharper will help inexperienced programmers to learn how to code better. So it's a training tool too. In these senses, it's actually of more use to trainees than it is to experienced programmers.
If your company considers Resharper worth getting for anybody, then the only reason not to get it for everyone is if you have such a tight budget that you can't afford to buy it now even though you know it will save you lots of money in the medium term.
They probably doubt that you will make any worth while use of it, and they have summed up that the avarage gain from a level 1 programmer is very little. This is obviously a generalisation, so you should prove them wrong.
Make a list of some of the features that you use in resharper demonstrating that you know Resharpers features, and for each estimate how much time you save pr. use.
Add reference and add import statement (xx seconds)
Move class to namespace (xx seconds)
Generate property, method, field etc. (xx seconds)
...
...
etc.
And then make a wild guess how many times you do that a day, and add it conservatively up to minutes a day.
Then figure out how much this saved time equals in cash a month, and counter that with the cost of Resharper. I bet it will be painfully obvious, that it would be a bad idea not to give you a Resharper license.
You can spice it up with code qualitiy increases from the statical code analysis.
If they still doubt you, give them a demo of some of the time saving features.
If you want to use resharper, why not just buy a license for yourself? Will they let you use it if you buy your own (non-personal) license? Perhaps it could be a deductable business cost?
Otherwise, I'd suggest trying to get support from those in the company who already use it.
Perhaps you could also explain your prior experience in using it previously, or give them a demonstration of how it speeds up your ability to implement code? Let them see for themselves, since they have labelled it as "no benefit to a level 1 programmer" - prove them wrong!
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Closed 11 years ago.
Are there any statistics for this? I realize it must vary from person to person, but it seems like there should be a general average.
The reason I ask is that the company I contract for has multiple software products, totaling ~75,000 lines of code - and they seemed disappointed and shocked when they ask me a question about a specific portion that I don't immediately know the answer to (I am the only programmer they have, and did not author the majority of the systems) They think I should just know it all from memory. So I wanted something like a statistic to show them that an average programmer couldn't possibly have all that in his head at one time. Or should I?
You should remember where to find the needed stuff not remember it itself.
You should also be familiar with code structure and architecture enough to make an educated guess where a problem might originate and where you could possibly find the stuff you know exist but not sure where exactly.
You brain works like cache. The stuff you used recently is kept there, more older entries are erased. But there will never be enough memory to remember the code all at once. Because then you will want to remember all API functions, then all specs, then something else. This all is not feasible.
And being surprised with you that you don't remember all the code is probably one more instance of those perversed notions of how programmers do things. Ignore them.
It depends not only on your memorization skills, but also a lot on the code. Obviously, clean, idiomatic code is much easier to memorize than a badly written inconsistent mess.
Probably because clean code can be broken down into much larger "abstract tokens".
Indeed interesting question but I am in doubt if there is adequate answer at all. Here are only obvious factors I see right from the start:
Overall design quality. Even if you are new in well designed code you can very quickly identify where you should look to get answers.
Project documentation quality. For poor documented projects even developers that are in project from the start can't say anything about some parts.
Implementation quality. OK. You have good general architecture, good documentation for interfaces but even one really bad programmer could break all of this. This is because many companies are very strict about code reviews and I think it is the only one technique to prevent such situation.
Programmer experience. As you move ahead you see number of 'already known' code "bricks" in software new to you and experience is great help in this so contractors are often very experienced specialists familiar with various approaches and this gives average contractor ability to move much faster then full time programmer which is brilliant but worked 10 years in only 1 project context.
General person smartness. My opinion this is really not so important as most of others factors but it is really important.
... but the common problem is often companies hire contractors for some existing software improvement and they simply think this is only about to hang picture on the wall. You should perform some negotiation to force them to understand part of work is to understand what really should be done to meet their requirements at all. And such "learning" requires resources and is part of work itself. But I think it is slightly off-topic for StackOverflow (despite I voted up ;) ). Is it more for Startups discussion?
Even if you have written all that code you might forget portions of it. But you'll be able to recall it once you review it.
I think its natural for a programmer to forget some portions of his/her code after a long time.
Ask them how they want you to spend your time: surveying vast amounts of code you didn't write and perhaps writing up internal documentation, or whatever currently keeps you occupied It's not a facetious question. If they want quicker response to new issues, they need to invest in research.
I don't think there's a meaningful answer to this measured in LOC. As a manager, what I want to know is that someone in your situation can answer a question in a reasonable amount of time -- and unless I know you're in the middle of something, I wouldn't expect that 'reasonable amount of time' to be 'instantaneously'.
You should be able to understand all the components within the system and how they interact so that when there is a problem you can isolate one or two likely components and drill down.
I find it helpful to draw a few diagrams and keep them handy so I can use them to communicate with my boss\customer as well as jog my memory.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Just want to ask for some opinions here. How do you feel about using a language (and/or framework) that isn't widely used in your location to write software for a company? For instance, I live in an area dominated by .NET, with the occasional PHP job. Let's say that I'm learning Python and decide to use it to write software for my job (I'm a "Team of One" so I can pretty much use anything I want).
Now their software is written in a language that pretty much nobody in the area uses or knows; if I were to leave the company, they'd basically have nobody to maintain/add to it unless they retain on me as a consultant. While that's really good for me, it seems a bit "crooked" - granted, that's how the business world works.
What are your thoughts?
I should mention that this is a very small company and I'm the only IT person, so I have full reign to choose our development platform. I'm not specifically using Python, but chose it as an example since my area is almost entirely .NET based; I don't care for .NET anymore though, which is why I don't want to consider using it. Also, the company is.. how shall we say... extremely frugal and wouldn't purchase the required resources for .NET (e.g. server licenses, SQL licenses, Visual Studio, components). I personally have an MSDN subscription but I can't use that for them.
Also FWIW there are people in the area who use the language I'm considering using (Ruby on Rails), but nowhere near as many people as .NET developers. It's not like I'm using something that only I know.
You may think that this approach is good for you. But in fact all this does is paint you in to a corner. The best way to get promotion - within an organisation is to make yourself unnecessary in your current position. That might seem like nonsense, but it is in fact true. Think of it like this, if it is essential to the company that you continue to maintain the python code you wrote for them, and they can't go to anyone else to get that skill, then they will continue to pay (maybe a little above market rates) to maintain that code.
If however, you write that code in .net where there is a plentiful supply in your area, then as the company expands and the code you've written proves successful, you will be able to hire people to maintain that code and you can move on to designing other systems. Or moving in to managing a team of .net coders - if that's your want.
Even if you want to leave, the best thing for your career is going to be to get the best possible reference. To do that, write them some code that is easy to maintain. Help them hire someone to replace you to maintain it. They will be grateful and recommend you as a consultant to their friends.
Code in something esoteric - for which there is little support in your area - and they will be saying to their friends on the golf course "no don't hire that guy, he wrote this system for us which does the job, but no one else can maintain it. We're stuck with him forever and now he's too busy to look after us properly!"
Do what's best for the business, not what might be of most interest to you - or appear that way on the face of it. You'll win out in the long run.
I think that you're responsible to decide on the language that's best suited for the job. That includes an objective evaluation of the merits of the language and framework, it includes your own personal skill with the language (since you're the one doing the work) and it includes maintainability by others. Only you and your company can decide how much importance to place on each of those.
For your own personal development, if your area is dominated by .net, why don't you want to get up to speed in that instead of Python?
From an ethical standpoint, I would not write something that could not easily be maintained by someone else.
A lot of responses seem to be a poor fit for the question. We're not talking about using an unapproved language in an environment with existing standards. We're talking about a situation where the poster is the entire IT and development department for his company.
It's certainly important to keep in mind availability of talent, but Ruby is hardly a fringe language these days. In an environment where there's only one developer, productivity is also a very important consideration. Being able to build and maintain software quickly and easily without a large team requires tools with different characteristics than a large team might require.
I think what's more important than whether to use Ruby or (something else) is to try to pick something as general-purpose as practical and use it for everything unless there's a really good reason to use something else. If you go with Ruby, stick with Ruby for your utility scripts, cron jobs and that little GUI app the boss wanted to automatically SMS the intern when he takes more than five minutes to bring him his coffee.
I think using python would be the right thing to do if it would meet the clients requirements, and save them money over the alternative. Whether or not there is a wide assortment of characters to work on the application down the road is irrelevant, unless they've specified this as a non-functional requirement.
As usual, using the best tool for the job at hand will serve you well.
It indeed is a bit crooked IF you use it only for that purpose.
However, if you use it because it IS the best solution, youre in the clear.
Also, they can just hire someone else who knows python.
My work ethics dont allow me to do something like this just to keep me in business.
My personal opinion is you should try where possible to respect the working practices of wherever you are - whether that's indentation style, naming convention, testing procedure or programming language.
If you feel strongly that a different language would be better suited for a certain task, then lobby to have it accepted (with the required re-training of others).
Purposefully leaving an app that no one else can maintain is very bad professional conduct, IMO.
We recently had a bad hire at my shop and he decided out of the blue he was going to use Perl instead of any version of .NET to do some simple reporting stuff (That could have just as easily been done in .NET). It was atrocious. I would suggest using the platform as specified and clearing any deviation with the people who run the joint...
Plenty of answers have touched on this, but here's my take based on production application support.
My company had a startup phase where code hustlers whipped up solutions in whatever the personal preference or flavor of the week was. Bad for maintainability and supportability.
Making a change is ok, though, as long as it's consistent. If Python is going to pave the way to the future, then go for it. Don't forget that the legacy .NET and PHP code still needs to be supported until end of life. Building yourself a hodge podge of platforms and frameworks will just create more difficulty for you on the job and the company when you're no longer around.
If you feel in your heart you are acting dishonestly, then you probably are.
No one likes a dishonest person. That can't be good for your reputation.
Do your best to choose based on what is actually best, not what satisfies some underhanded motives.
It depends. I did some of what would normally just be a bash script, in Java instead at one place. Why? Because they're all Java programmers and frequently have interns/coops coming through that may or may not know anything else (and may or may not even be all that great with Java).
Other places though tend to have more experienced programmers and I expect that they'll be able to figure out another language without too much effort. So, I would go with what's "best" for the project.
I agree with what mquander says above, but you may also have to be prepared to justify why you want to use this other language to your development manager. If he/she then agrees, perhaps the language could become more widely adopted within the company.
Think of it in terms of business benefit you bring to the company, now and in the mid-term.
If you can deliver something much faster using a different technology, and it still achieves the goals, I'd go for it - but I'd still let some other people know and respect the company's final decision. If however, it's purely for yourself, then I'd probably be a litte more careful.
I think it's a really bad idea. For you, it means there's no back up in case you want to have a day (or week) off. For them, there's no one else if you leave or are taking a day off. It's a well known ploy, and, honestly, might be reason to not keep you around.
However, this could also be a chance to introduce Python into the environment. You could teach others about it, and explain to management while it's a good third language to have at the group's disposal.
I used to think that you should always pick the right language for the job at work. I'm reversing my opinion though.
The problem arises when some other guy picks a language you don't want to learn. I am concerned that I might be the guy who picks the language no one else wants to learn. Just because I think that Erlang might be the right choice for something doesn't mean that everyone else will want to learn Erlang or respect my decision for using Erlang.
"if I were to leave the company, they'd basically have nobody to maintain/add to it unless they retain on me as a consultant."
Are you saying no one else can learn Python? I find that hard to believe.
New technology is often introduced in small projects by knowledgeable people and diffused through the organization because the small projects were successful.
Use Python. Be successful. Make your case based on your successes.
I had this same problem very often. Coincidentally, it was with those two languages you mention: .NET forced on me, when I preferred to use Python (among others). Could be the opposite, I don't judge.
I refrained to use Python, because of the reasons already mentioned in other answers. I did what I thought was best for the company. Using IronPython won't make your python code any more maintainable for an unexperienced Python programmer.
However, I left the company and now I work in something more in line with my tastes. I'm much happier. In this economy you may not have this option... but it will pass. Do the right thing.
Cheers.
There is a large difference between 'prototype' or 'one-shot' code and production code. For prototyping I use whatever works fastest, but I'm very clear about its status. Production code is written in one of the approved and supported environments.
The ethics is to use the best tool for the job. If there is a tool that takes you only 20% of the time to code vs other choices, and next to no maintenance, and easy to re-factor, you have a duty to pick that tool, assuming it's extensible as you may need in the business.
If you do a good job, hiring future people and training them in terms of HOW your workplace does business should be the practice of any growing business. They will be able to learn the code if they're the right person for the business.
In your case I'm not sure if you want to use Python, unless it has native .NET support to allow your .NET world to interact with it.
Other posters have made some good points, but here's one I've not seen: Communicate the situation to management and let them decide. In other words, talk with your boss and tell him or her that there currently are more .NET developers in your area, so that if you're hit by a bus tomorrow it would easier to find someone else to maintain your code; however, there are tools you need to do your job more efficiently and they cost money (and tell them how much). Alternatively, you could do this in Python or RoR (or whatever) and use free tools, but from what you know, there aren't currently that many people in the area who know those languages. I've used "currently" a couple times here because this may change over time.
Before having this conversation, it might be good to see if you can find user groups for the alternative technology in your area, and how large they are. You could also ask on listserves if there are people who know the alternatives in your area.
Of course, the boss may tell you to keep using .NET without any tools, but in that case it's their decision to shoot themselves in the foot. (And yours to decide if you want to find a new job.)
Regarding the question as asked, I see nothing unethical about it, provided that:
It is a freely-available language. Although I am something of a FOSS partisan, that's not the point of this criterion. It needs to be freely-available (not necessarily FOSS) so that it doesn't impose costs on the company and so that others will have the opportunity to learn it if you ever need to be replaced (or if they want to compete with you for your job).
You are changing languages for solid reasons and not for the sake of creating vendor lock-in (or, if you prefer to think of it as such, "job security"). Ethics aside, you really don't want to have a job where they hate you, but are stuck with you because you're the only one who can maintain the mess you've created anyhow.
In the particular case you've described, I would suggest that switching to RoR may be the more ethical choice, as it would be decidedly unethical (not to mention illegal) to use .NET if there are required resources which are for-pay only and your employer is too cheap frugal to purchase proper licenses for them.
When in Rome... do as the Romans.
You might not be the one who as to maintain this code in the long term and not everyone wants to learn a "fringe language" to make bugfixes or enhancements.
I migrated some VBA stuff over to Perl for processing at a previous job and increased the efficiency by several orders of magnitude, but ultimately no-one else there was willing to learn Perl so I got stuck with that task longer than I wanted it.
I did that, it was Delphi in my case. I think Delphi was used often however when i was looking for a job .... i saw 3 delphi job offers in my whole life. i also saw more java/j2ee/php offers that i can remember. i think its bad idea, with the time i wasted in learning advance delphi programming i could get better with j2ee and start in better company and maybe make now more money.
If they cant find somebody to maintain the app you will always do it and when you quit they will have to re-write it. i think consultant thing is not used often.
I used to be in the "use the best tool for the job" school, but I've changed my mind. It's not enough to just ask "how can I do this job the fastest." If you think you're the only one who will ever need to look at some code, there's a good chance you're mistaken. The total cost of introducing a new language into an environment is higher than you might imagine at first.
If you just need to produce a result, not a program, then you can use whatever you want. Say you need a report or you need to munge some files. If the output is really all that matters, say it's something you could have chosen to do by hand, you can practice using any language you want.
With the release of the MVC Framework I too have been in a similar ethical delema. Use WebForms or switch over to MVC Framework for everything. The answer really is you have to do the right thing and use whatever the standard of the company is. If you deviate from the standard it creates a lot of problems for people.
Think how you would feel if you were dumped a project on VB6 when all you have been doing for years is .Net. So these are the two solutions I have come up with.
Use your fun languages for consulting contracts you do on the side. Make sure the client knows what you are doing and if they agree go for it.
Try and convince your current company to migrate over to this great new language you are working with.
If you follow these routes you will learn your language and not piss anyone off in the process.
Ruby on Rails is certainly not a fringe language. If the company is too cheap to pony up for the appropriate licensing for Microsoft's tools, then you would have no choice but to find an alternative. RoR certainly would be a reasonable choice and if helps move your career along as well, then it's win-win for both of you!
You can develop .NET adequately with free tools; cost is not a good reason to avoid that platform. Ruby on Rails is becoming reasonably mainstream for building data-driven internet websites. You haven't even told us if thats the sort of software you are building though.
There is really no way with the information that you have provided that anyone can give you a single correct answer.
If you are asking is it ethical to do your work in such a way that the company is dependent upon you, of course the answer is no. If you are asking is it ethical to develop in RoR then the answer is "we don't know" - but my opinion is that probably it would be fine if its the right tool for the job.
Don't underestimate the ability of someone else to support your work or replace you though - if you do your work reasonably well once the solution is in place any programmer worth their pay should be able to learn the platform well enough to maintain it. I've debugged, migrated and supported a few PHP applications for example without ever hardly learning the first thing about PHP. I'd be lost building a new PHP app from scratch and would never even try but its no problem to support one. I think the same would be true of the languages you mention as well - they've got the critical mass that means there is plenty of books and forums etc. Of course if its written badly enough in any language then it may be difficult to support regardless of anyone's skill in the language...
So much discussion for such a clear-cut situation...
It's not up to you, it's up to them. If they're not technical enough to make the call, as it seems, then you have to make it for them in good faith. Anything less is dishonest, and I'm fairly sure that's not in your job description ;)
You've muddied the waters with all the wandering about in the thickets of personal motivations. The answer to that one is that your personal motivations are irrelevant unless and until you've formulated the business case for the possible decisions. If you've done that and the answer still isn't clear-cut, then sure, choosing the answer you like the best is one of the nice things about being in a position to make technical decisions in the first place.
As far as the actual question goes, to my mind if the most technically apt choice is also one that very few people work with, one of two things is happening: a) It's a good choice, and the number of people working with it is going to be exploding over the next 18-24 months (e.g. Django), or b) There's something wrong with my analysis. Technologies may be on the fringe because people are slow to adopt them, but that's generally not why they stay on the fringe.
If you find yourself thinking "I can't choose technology X, that'll make it easier for them to replace me!" you're in the wrong line of work. In almost any enterprise that's not actually failing, the IT guy who makes himself easy to replace tends to move up to harder and more interesting and more lucrative work.
I would not bring a new language/framework/whatever into the place unless they understood that's what I was doing, and that if I left/was fired/was hit by a bus, they'd have to find/train someone to work with it.
I have some experience in a contractor pulling in things just because he felt like it. In some cases they were the best tool for the job (in other cases they were not), but in all cases they were not the best tool for the team that had to maintain the code. In my case the contractor was a serious jerk who didn't really give a darn about anyone else and I believe WAS trying to make himself harder to replace.
In your case, talk to your bosses. If they really don't want to spend the needed money on .NET framework tools/libs, then switching to something else may well BE the right thing to do for them, long term.
And, as someone who has spent his career walking into the middle projects that others have already started - thank you for thinking before you add a new tool to the mix.
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Recently, we've come across an issue at work where if one person is working on some code by themselves, it seems to come out with the other team members looking at it and going "Huh? That's ugly, unmanageable, I need to rewrite that"
In fact, recently, I myself have had to re-factor something that was written the week before so that I'd be able to add in my (related) feature.
I know that Pair programming is the way to go for this, but we have an uneven team (3 members). As our team is being pushed pretty hard at the moment, we really don't have time for Peer Reviews (though we can do Pair Programming, as we're allowed to estimate that into our task estimates)
I'm just curious as to how people would suggest we overcome these issues with poor code being generated.
When you work alone, and produce code which your colleagues find ugly and unmanageable and needs to be rewritten, then do you:
(a) agree with them when you look at it a second time,
(b) disagree?
If (a), then the problem is that on your own, you aren't fully clarifying your code when you write it. Since pair programming is the only thing making you write decent code, I suppose I'd recommend that the "odd one out" should work on tasks which do not involve writing long tracts of bad code: bug-hunting; maybe writing test code, since that tends to be a bit less fiendish. Meanwhile, work on improving your skills at writing better code - perhaps do reviews of your own code from a few months ago, and make notes as to what was wrong with it.
If (b), then the problem you have is incompatible ways of expressing your ideas. The code may not be bad by your standards, but it's mutually incomprehensible, which in a corporate setting means it's bad code. Pair programming means what you write is a compromise that 2 out of 3 of you understand, but that's not really a solution. You need to come to some mutual agreements about what you find most difficult about each other's code, and stop doing that. And you all urgently need to start thinking of "code quality" in terms of "my 2 colleagues will like this code", not "I like this code".
Either way, you all need to work on writing code for the purpose of being read, rather than for the purpose of getting the immediate job done as quickly as you possibly can. Personally I have done this by trying to express things in the way that I think other people might express and understand them, rather than just what makes sense to me at the time. Eventually it becomes habitual. When I write code, I write it for a public audience just like I'm writing this post for a public audience. OK, so on my personal projects it's an audience of people who think just like me, whereas at work it's an audience that thinks like my colleagues. But the principle is to write code as if someone's reading it. You're explaining yourself to them, not the compiler.
Not that my code is the best in the world, but I do think I benefited in that my first job was in a company with 30-odd programmers, so I got to see a wide range of ways of thinking about things. Also a few examples of "what not to do", where one programmer had done something that nobody else could easily understand, and therefore could definitively be said to be bad. With only 3 people, it's not clear whether a 2 v. 1 difference of opinion means that the 1 is a freak or a reasonable minority. When I did something and 4 or 5 people could glance at it and immediately say "eeew, don't do that", then I started to really believe it was just a dumb idea in the first place.
I'd also recommend that if you aren't allowed to budget for code review, lie and cheat. If you're heavily re-writing someone else's code, you're effectively taking the time to review it anyway, you just aren't providing the feedback which is the worthwhile part of code review. So sneak the review in under the radar - write a function or three, then ask a colleague to look at it and give you instant feedback on whether it makes sense to them. It helps to have a conversation as soon as you've done it, with the code on the monitor, but do try not to interrupt people when they have "flow", or to get into lengthy arguments. It's not pair programming, and it's not formal code review, but it might help you figure out what it is you're doing on your own that's so bad.
I'm surprised that you don't have time to do peer reviews but you have time to do paired programming. Is the latter not a much bigger sink of time?
We also have three developers only at our company and, surprise, surprise, we're being pushed hard at the moment. I'm pretty sure my boss would laugh at me if I suggested paired programming because that would be viewed as doubling the number of man hours for a task even though in practice that's not the result it should produce. Our peer reviews are never more than an hour and that is an extreme case. On average I would say they are probably about 10 minutes and, per developer, only happen once or twice in a day.
IMO you should give peer reviews a try. You often find that the offending people (i.e. the people writing the lower quality code) eventually realise that they need to make more of an effort and the quality improves over time.
If you have three developers and each of you think the others code is not good, you urgently need peer reviews.
So:
you are being pushed pretty hard
your code is of poor quality
Do you think the two could possibly be related? The answer is to fix the schedule.
Pair up all three at once.
Set up some coding standards.
Use a dunce cap for build breaking developers.
Perform daily stand up meetings to communicate progress.
Also try peer reviews twice a week, like Tuesday and Friday.
Pair Programming doesn't have to be all day every day to be effective. I have seen good results from even an hour or two working together each week. One way to go would be to pair A & B for a while, then A & C, then A & B... with a lot of individual time in between.
It also depends a lot on the personalities and chemistry of the team members. Two of the three might work exceptionally well together and you'd want to benefit from that.
You should still pair. Set up sessions say 1 day per week and rotate the pairs. This should keep your manager happy and increase the quality of the code, improve communication. If you keep metrics on how many faults happen in paired vs solitary coding you should start to see the benfit and display this to your manager,
eg This took x man hours but saved on average y in defect fixing. Additionally the clode is cleaner and will take less time to alter then next time we touch it.
From there you will have hard statistics and you can start to code more.
Basically your story seems to be the same as mine.
No time to do things.
Mistakes happen.
Rush to fix it (taking more time)
Go to 1
You need to stop the rot.
Code reviews
Enable Stylecop that will force you to write readable, standardised and manageable code
We use code reviews. Additionally there are some single task: changing a diagram, installing some stuff...
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I'm the second dev and a recent hire here at a PHP/MySQL shop. I was hired mostly due to my experience in wrangling some sort of process out of a chaotic mess. At least, that's what I did at my last company. ;)
Since I've been here (a few months now), I've brought on board my boss, my product manager and several other key figures (But mostly chickens, if you pardon the Scrum-based stereotyping). I've also helped bring in some visibility to the development cycle of a major product that has been lagging for over a year. People are loving it!
However, my coworker (the only other dev here for now) is not into it. She prefers to close her door and focus on her work and be left alone. Me? I'm into the whole Agile approach of collaboration, cooperation and openness. Without her input, I started the Scrum practices (daily scrums, burndown charts and other things I've found that worked for me and my previous teams (ala H. Kniberg's cool wall chart). During our daily stand up she slinks by and ignores us as if we actually weren't standing right outside her door (we are actually). It's pretty amazing. I've never seen such resistance.
Question... how do I get her onboard? Peer pressure is not working.
Thanks from fellow Scrum-borg,
beaudetious
While Scrum other agile methodologies like it embody a lot of good practices, sometimes giving it a name and making it (as many bloggers have commented on) a "religion" that must be adopted in the workplace is rather offputting to a lot of people, including myself.
It depends on what your options and commitments are, but I know I'd be a lot more keen on accepting ideas because they are good ideas, not because they are a bandwagon. Try implementing/drawing her in to the practices one at a time, by showing her how they can improve her life and workflow as well.
Programmers love cool things that help them get stuff done. They hate being preached at or being asked to board what they see as a bandwagon. Present it as the former rather than the latter. (It goes without saying, make sure it actually IS the former)
Edit: another question
I've never actually worked for a place that used a specific agile methodology, though I'm pretty happy where I'm at now in that we incorporate a lot of agile practices without the hype and the dogma (best of both worlds, IMHO).
But I was just reading about Scrum and, is a system like that even beneficial for a 2 person team? Scrum does add a certain amount of overhead to a project, it seems, and that might outweigh the benefits when you have a very small team where communication and planning is already easy.
Without her input, I started the Scrum practices (daily scrums, burndown charts and other things I've found that worked for me and my previous teams (ala H. Kniberg's cool wall chart). During out daily stand up she slinks by and ignores us as if we actually weren't standing right outside her door (we are actually). It's pretty amazing. I've never seen such resistance.
Question... how do I get her onboard? Peer pressure is not working.
Yikes! Who would ever want to work in such an oppressive environment? If you're lucky, she's sending around her resume and you'll be able to hire someone who is on board with your development process.
Assuming you want to hang on to her, I'd turn down (or off) the rhetoric and work on being a friend and co-worker first. If the project is a year late, she can't be feeling good about herself and it sounds like you aren't afraid to trumpet your success. That can be intimidating.
I know nothing about Scrum, however. I'm just imagining what it would be like to walk around in your co-worker's shoes.
beaudetious, buddy,
I would really suggest you read Steve Yegge's blog called "Good Agile, Bad Agile". It's an oldy but a goody, and I think it's a must read for anyone - like myself about 2 months ago - who gets a little let's say "over-eager" to agile-up their workplace. Agile offers a lot of good practices, but you have to take them all with a grain of salt and adopt what you're lacking and skip out on all the other crud that might be unuseful for a particular situation - e.g. the daily scrum. If your co-worker would just like to code in quiet (read Peopleware for why this is a good thing) and she's being a productive team member quit bugging her with your scrumming a let her work in whatever way she likes most.
People are usually less "hostile" about these practices if you just approach them and simply say "Do you have a sec? Listen, communication is really a problem right now, I feel like I don't know what you're doing and I really don't want to step on your toes again and spend two days writing something you already did like last week, so let's work on this. I'd like to try X, what do you think?". Be compassionate and don't tolerate "bad apples", that's literally how I agiled up my workplace, and many problems have started evaporating. We're by no means an 100% XP or 100% Scrum compliant place, because we just use whatever works and was needed.
Simple. Don't talk about scrum. Don't use scrum on her. Instead take the underlying principles of scrum (e.g. the purpose as opposed to the application) and create different approaches that accommodate her way of working but have subtle tints of scrum.
All humans are different and a lot of programmers dislike scrum. I wouldn't force it upon them as that would just be counter-productive. I'd suggest identifying the problems in the development process (in a non-scrum fashion), see if you can get her to agree that the issues exist, then ask her what she thinks would be a good solution. Her co-operation and input into the process is essential to her co-operation, if she doesn't have buy-in she wont become a citizen.
From there on in you can hopefully create some sort of quasi-hybrid scrum + her approach to the process where you can both agree on the way forward.
I think the key would be to help her understand why you are doing Scrum in the first place. I guess you have your reasons, so why not tell her? You are likely to get resistance towards any change if the people involved don't understand why there is change or what they will benefit from it. If you can explain your reasons for using Scrum, and the following benefits, to her in a way that relates to her everyday work, I think she is more likely to adapt a more positive attitude towards it.
If she sees no value in the Scrum process, or doesn't understand how it relates to her, she probably won't care about it.
I think one of the most important concepts for someone to understand regarding Scrum is the fact that you are working as a group and commit to your project as a group, not as individuals. For many people, this is the hardest thing to grasp, since they are so used to living in "their own World".
I'm not sure Scrum is the central issue here; I'm guessing she feels threatened by the new guy bringing in a lot of new ideas and stirring things up. I've been in that situation before as the new person bringing in a new perspective on things, and sometimes it's just difficult to immediately bring those existing people around to a new way of thinking. It often requires a culture shift which doesn't happen overnight.
Try to get her input and opinion on things as much as possible, and try to show that you respect that she has been on the team longer than you. If after a while she still doesn't participate, then all you can do is mention it to your Manager and let them take it from there.
Continue your efforts to involve the other developer. Remember you are the one who wants to make this change. Ask for help with problems you have. Invite them to the daily stand up meeting. I currently do the planning for the daily stand up and I make sure all the pigs and chickens are invited. If you are the lead on the project it is up to you to address the situation and take a risk. Put yourself out there.