Amen. I don't know about firing, but I'd definitely be having a conversation about proper mentorship. We hire juniors because they show promise, but need to learn. Being snarky and shutting them down doesn't just hurt the individual dev – it hurts the entire company.
Firing for laughing? Did you forget the point of the article? Be kind. Don't hand out harsh punishments for mistakes. Teach instead. (Only fire if the person is immune to teaching.)
Let me relay a story about people who laugh at and mock other people's work.
My wife used to work as a copy editor at a major newspaper and worked with one of those "laugh at and make rude comments about other people's work" kind of people. The copy editing checks had to be checked by another copy editor before it was allowed to be forwarded to the layout team for placement in the news paper. How the story checkin and checkout system worked was that your submitted checks were anonymous to other team members. So, there was this one guy on copy editing team who openly mocked and call other people's work "stupid" and "idiotic". He could never say the person's name that he was talking about, but since every copy editor was in the same room, you knew he might be talking about your work. Everyone hated the guy and everyone complained about the guy. My wife would say how much everyone just hated working with the guy and he was just one of those people that made the job unpleasant.
Then layoffs came around (Newspaper in the Internet Age). When this guy was laid off, champagne bottle were opened up and people celebrated. You know when someone is bad when there is a "sorry to see you go" bar get together and they are not invited. A strange thing happened though, productivity went up because people felt better about submitting their work for final approval. Less copy editor mistakes, less stress, more learning, more openness and more engaging with other team members happend. Barriers between teams fell and even with layoffs, people felt better.
It turns out that the person who mocks other people's work, make for a crappy work environment. You can be tolerant of failures on technical levels, but failure in personal level should not be tolerated. Be pleasant to work with, or should you should be fired.
hmm, seems a bit harsh. For instance if your guy had done that once and been taken to the side and told "stop, shut up, never do that again, next time you're fired" then (a) the work environment would have improved much faster and (b) he might have never done it again. Firing instantly for one harsh comment/action seems like foolishness, just like keeping a known problem person around forever (as in your story) seems like foolishness.
Fireable offense? Software Development is a profession, it's not coding school. Junior Devs are expected to have have an education, written code before, and know the basics. If they write something so crazy that it induces a chuckle, it's probably pretty bad. By all means tell them how to fix it, but don't mask the fact that the job they are getting paid to do expects them to know how to do this.
Maybe an analogy would do better. In the Army, Soldiers go through basic training and are taught just that - the basics. Once they show up at a unit, they will have lots of questions and lots to learn. But if they show up with their name patch velcroed upside-down on their uniform, I guarantee their Sergeant is going to chuckle before they tell the Soldier to turn it right-side up.
Yeah, there's an obvious lack of details in the story that should preclude judgement of the poster.
I've seen people write things like: if (true == true)
I won't be mean to you about it, but I can't promise I won't chuckle a little before explaining why that's unnecessary. If you've been working in a professional setting for 3 years and are writing code like that, then yeah, I might struggle to be empathetic.
I've never waded into JavaScript, so I'll take your word for it. I've heard some...surprising...things about JavaScript, so I'm not really taken aback that this might exist.
I'm referencing a time when I was in school, and most everything was taught in Java, where that doesn't make sense. This was written by someone who was almost finished their degree and had already started at their professional job. Definitely junior, but I still feel like that's stretching the acceptable level of noobishness. That said, I have an EE degree, so maybe had to solve / reduce a lot more boolean algebra expressions than a straight CS major?
Your comparison is apple and orange if you think a person's education in software is comparable to an army. in army, the training is real hands on. rigid. while learning how to code is never a real hands on, always partly figuring out on your own, thus each person having more various understanding/competency on how to do the job.
I think you're quite possibly judging the guy too much based on a simple internet comment.
His statement could mean anything from cruelly laughing in the face of the junior dev during a face to face code review to having a quick heh under his breath from the privacy of his office at the developer's use of "if (foo === true)". Or anything in between.
> I think you're quite possibly judging the guy too much based on a simple internet comment.
There are such judgements in every thread.
It's even better when it is paired with the famous "I would not hire you" (or its variation "I would fire you") although the conversation does relate to this at all, the OP has shown no intent no be hired in any company, let alone the answerer's company, and, icing on the cake, the answerer is not in a position to hire anyone.
Again, the guy spent 3 years at Amazon and was talking himself up big. I looked at the code and started laughing. He wasn't a junior in title, in fact, he was on his way to being senior and had his eyes on an architect position.
That is my defense and the only time I've laughed at someone's code. I guess the combination of him talking himself up big about all the amazing things he did at Amazon and the code vomit that he actually produced was too much for me.
I regret it, but he shouldn't really have been that junior after 3 years?
Though I guess I still write pretty shitty code now too on occasion.
Well, no. It is the product of someone's work. Someone who is trying to learn and should be supported and taught how to make it better and why it is not as good as it should be.
My team playfully makes fun of each other's code all the time. Every once in a while, someone does something stupid in code and we playfully make fun of that person, everyone on the team takes it in stride and our code is better for it.
Hell, every now and then I stumble across some idiocy in the code base and think "LOL, whoever did it this way is an idiot". git blame. "OH, hahaha, it was me, what an idiot past me was, amirite guys?" Everyone on the team takes levity about mistakes very seriously ;) It's healthy.
Mocking condescension on the other hand is a different thing entirely.
If someone's work is poor enough that a reasonable person might laugh at it, then there's nothing wrong with that. Hence the phrase "laugh at our mistakes". It doesn't mean you are a bad coder/painter, it just means you made mistakes that were a little funny and can learn from them like anyone else.
There's a difference between laughing at your own mistakes and laughing at someone else's. People who are ridiculed for making mistakes are incentivized to hide their mistakes rather than learning from them.
Is it? Or is it more like laughing at someone who built a table with 3 legs and wonder why it fell over? Or someone who fixed a car but forgot to put the engine back and wonders why they can't go anywhere?
Senior devs make mistakes too. I think your tone is rather inappropriate given that the poster seems aware of the inappropriateness of his response and is apologizing for making that sort of mistake.
While I admire the sentiment, I've NEVER seen an asshole fired for belittling juniors/co-workers.
Harsh, withering treatment is quite common not just with developers but in all technical fields. I wish things were different, but that's the reality as I've seen it.
At more than one place where I've worked with at least semi-functional management, people with attitudes like that tend to get moved to special "one person" teams and then are given a long stream of crap work (or at least work they feel is beneath them) until they get bored and quit.
I've seen it once, but the guy cursed and laughed at the team architect when we had a meeting instructing us to start writing tests and adhering to a certain level of code coverage. Seeing the guy literally begging for his job after witnessing him demean and belittle people for months was kind of eye opening to me.
No, it means he expected that particular person's code quality to be better than that, because he lasted at a 'Big Four' company for three years and thus should have decent coding chops, but apparently didn't, thus the incongruence made him laugh. It doesn't mean all Amazon coders are shit.
I like figuring out how to look at a sentence how others do (like those images that can be viewed two ways). But I'm having trouble with this one. Amazon devs being generally bad would not be suitable for use as a defense ("in my defense") for his behavior. I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.
I too originally read it as saying that it was expected to be bad coming from Amazon. And the "in my defense" part is that, if you know the coder is from Amazon, then you understand why the code might actually be truly bad enough to elicit a chuckle (as opposed to just chuckling at normal bad code). In other words, it's like saying "in my defense, it was super bad code".
That said, I think the interpretation that "he had 3 years experience at a big company, he should have been better" is probably the correct one.
> I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.
They are so bad that laughing is permissible.
Maybe you just don't spend enough time around arrogant people to interpret this sentence this way :)
That is completely unacceptable behavior. If you were in my company I would petition to have you fired. I hold a strict no asshole rule, life is too short to work with people who would do something like that.
Then you're as bad as he is. Especially given that he's already acknowledged he shouldn't have done it. Indignation doesn't make you right, it just makes you stubborn.
People ready to fire someone for laughing should not be allowed to work with other human beings at all, in my opinion.
What's going on with this ready to be offended for wind blowing the wrong way culture and the fragile egos?
It's not just about laughing. It's about laughing at someone's work in a derogatory manner. I hope you can tell the difference and understand the extremely negative impact the latter can have on culture.
I disagree. Firing assholes is never bad for culture. On the contrary, it increases morale and makes the workplace better.
Keep in mind that I don't categorize laughing at someone's work as a "simple mistake." Bugs can be simple mistakes. Offensive jokes can be simple mistakes. Laughing at someone's work however is deeply troubling behavior that actively undermines trust and discourages cooperation in the workplace. That's why you have to kill it with fire.
Firing somebody based on your own subjective opinions is toxic for culture.
I've worked on amazing teams with plenty of good natured ribbing and I've worked on great high performing teams where you could say "this code is rubbish, you can do better". I've also worked on teams where saying that would really hurt people's feelings and impact moral.
Put aside your own pre-conceptions and look at how your team responds to an event/situation. That's the only way to build a high performing team.
Sometimes that will mean laughing at someone's code is toxic and needs to be addressed, other times it will be a non-issue and addressing it creates an issue, and other times it can even be a good bonding exercise.
I already specified that this isn't just about laughing, but about laughing at someone's work in a derogatory manner. You seem to be saying "but a laugh can mean other things!" and it's kind of besides the point.
No. I'm not. I'm saying people, cultures, and teams operate differently and assuming that laughing at someone's work is toxic rather than looking at the actual impact to the team is unprofessional and a sign of poor leadership.
I worked in a team where if you broke the build you had to put on a clown nose for the rest of the day. It worked well and was a bit of fun. We still catch up a couple of times a year even though I left that team more than 5 years ago.
I've worked in other teams where pressuring a team member to wear a clown nose would be harassment and deeply unsettling.
Everyone seems to be taking this too far--parent just mentioned a laugh. It could be anything from a well meaning jab to a mean put-down, and I'm reading it as just something funny for the junior to learn.
