I Don’t Care If Dolphins Become Extinct

Photo by Ranae Smith on Unsplash

Who cares about dolphins exactly? You probably have only seen 5 examples of the water-based mammal in your life.

If they went extinct nothing would really happen. Sure, we would need seals to fill the void of entertaining animals at the zoos pool and that would take a transition. 

Who exactly cares?

This brings me onto software development.

If your team achieves those things with 62% code coverage rather than 90%, I don’t care about your code coverage. With me?

Yes, you prefer that one to the dolphins right? Well, the rest of this article is about software development rather than animal eradication so you might just like it more than you might think.

I Don’t Care If Your Code Is Clean

Users don’t care whether your methods are seven lines long. They care whether the software works. Developers sometimes optimize code for other developers while forgetting there is supposed to be a product at the end of all this.

So I didn’t care when a senior developer attacked my code for not being clean. BTW they didn’t know who Uncle Bob is, and there was no point in refactoring the code either.

I Don’t Care About Your Code Coverage

You can have 100% code coverage and terrible tests. You can have lower coverage and extremely reliable software. The number is only useful until somebody turns it into a target.

So when we had a requirement that all pushed code had to be covered by tests (80% test coverage at a minimum) it was a trash requirement. DevOps implemented it without telling the software development team as well. It did not improve code quality one bit.

I Don’t Care About Your Story Points

Three points. Five points. Eight points. Wonderful. None of those numbers tell a customer when their feature will actually arrive.

They also bear no resemblance to the actual time it takes to write the code.

I Don’t Care If You Use Agile

I care whether your team can actually deliver software. Calling meetings ceremonies and deadlines sprints doesn’t magically make a dysfunctional development process Agile.

Is our board Kanban or Agile? I couldn’t care less.

I Don’t Care About Best Practice

Tell me why the practice is appropriate here. Software developers have an extraordinary ability to copy something from another company, another project, or somebody’s conference talk and then call it best practice.

Sometimes best practice makes no sense. The business failed because of Covid, and the learnings are nothing. A competitor created a similar product two months before, and the learnings are nothing.

I Don’t Care What Architecture You Use

Clean Architecture. Microservices. Something somebody invented last Tuesday. If nobody can safely change the software, your beautiful architecture diagram isn’t helping.

If I buy a house I don’t care about the architecture. I care about the street it’s on.

I Don’t Care How Many Lines of Code You Wrote

Writing more code isn’t necessarily productive. Sometimes the best day’s programming involves deleting 500 lines and going home.

All code isn’t equal. Which is why I make pull requests with one-line changes. I’m awesome, aren’t I?

I Don’t Care How Fast You Code

Typing isn’t usually the difficult bit. Understanding what needs to be built is. AI makes this distinction even more interesting because generating code is becoming increasingly cheap.

Yet still we try to impress each other with how much code we are pushing, and how fast we are pushing it. Which is actually not impressive at all.

I Don’t Care If You Know LeetCode

Unless my production system unexpectedly asks you to invert a binary tree before lunch, I’d rather know whether you can build and maintain software.

I’m starting to not care about interviews at all actually. There is so much opportunity with AI, perhaps the future is away from pointless interview questions after all.

I Don’t Care If You Work Hard

I care whether you produce good work. Twelve-hour days don’t impress me if six hours were spent recovering from decisions you made because you were exhausted.

It’s the output which should be impressive, not the hours you put in.

I Don’t Care If You Come Into the Office

I care whether I can work with you. Sitting twenty feet away while communicating exclusively through Slack isn’t collaboration with a commute added.

I just wish I wasn’t measured on the number of days I enter the office (hung over or not).

I Don’t Care If You Attend Stand-Up

If you’re blocked, tell somebody. If you’re not blocked, keep working. Listening to twenty people recite ticket numbers isn’t necessarily teamwork.

I’m actually thinking of stopping attending stand-up just as a silent protest about wasting my entire life in these things.

I Don’t Care If You’re a Senior Developer

Job titles are cheap. I’ve met experienced developers who couldn’t solve ordinary problems and less experienced developers who were excellent. Show me what you can actually do.

BTW you need to be a senior developer here within two years, if not you will be fired. So actually here senior means something (you can stay here longer than two years).

I Don’t Care If AI Writes Your Code

I care whether you understand the code. If AI writes a correct solution that you can explain, test, maintain, and take responsibility for, I’m struggling to care who pressed the keys.

Yet I know you aren’t even reading your code. You don’t read, and you don’t write your code.

I Don’t Care If We Miss the Deadline

I’d rather miss an arbitrary deadline than spend the following month fixing the rushed software we released to meet it.

Which means I don’t fit in with my current employer at all.

About The Author

Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.

The Secret Developer has spent years being told things are “best practice”, and has just realized that those are not the best things at all.