PROGRAMMING
How to Piss Off a Developer
Talking about If-else vs. Polymorphism is one way.
It’s honestly quite easy. Basically, anything can tick off a developer. The more “religious” views the developer holds, the easier it is. In my opinion, there’s no culture more toxic than that of developers, programmers, and engineers.
Yeah, there’s even much discussion on when you’re a measly developer — aka code monkey — an esteemed programmer, or a sanctimonious engineer. Some engineers are furiously agitated when called “developer.”
I’m just going to enumerate a bunch of stuff that really hits home with developers, in no particular order. I guess they all infuriate programmers to varying degrees depending on experiences, skills, and beliefs.
If-else vs. polymorphism.
Boy, did I not know what a hornet’s nest I walked into when I published one of my first articles, Stop Using If-Else. The article received over 100.000 views in less than a few days (that’s somewhat viral in Medium standards). It even spawned its own hate-thread on Reddit. Apparently, there’s a whole religion centered around writing bad code with traditional branching, like using if-else.
If you’re into this subject, you might also want to read Replacing If-else With Commands and Handlers or If-Else Is a Poor Man’s Polymorphism.
Simply using OOP is aggravating to some, and so is telling beginners that object-oriented thinking is too complex for them.
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Non-tech people estimating programming tasks.
One of my first projects ever was estimated by a colleague with a master’s in political science. We had to deliver a solution developed from scratch during the project, which included setting up three cloud environments, creating the database model, writing the business logic, back-end and front-end.
Estimated time and resources: 34–36 hours, single developer. The timeframe was presented to the client without consulting me about what’s realistic.
