advice on working with others? a central challenge at work (warning: long)

[mrlynn]

SDGuy wrote:
Is there no leader for this team?

This is the key question. If you're a perfectionist, and the leader is a Bill Gates, you're going to be wildly out of place, and had best move on to a company where the leader is a Steve Jobs, who holds people to a high standard, even if it takes an extra year to get it right.

/Mr Lynn

[cbelt3]

It sounds like you are a designer working with Code Monkeys. We have folk like that in our department (I'm an SAP / Business Warehouse developer in a global manufacturing company). I force good design standards by just.. doing that part of the work myself. And let the coders.. code.

Set standards, and don't let 'em get past the human engineering guidelines.

I've passed around the famous Apple Human Engineering standards manual a few times in my day. Or talked about my experience designing weapon systems control panels, and talking about 'pilot workload' and 'gunner focus'.

[haikuman]

[quote=Black]
With a few exceptions, all programmer types I know have an unshakeable belief that they are of superior intelligence to all other people they encounter in their everyday lives.

What if the person is not a programmer yet obviously a genius.....however modesty is their best quality.....
I might know someone like that :devil: :priate:

[Janit]

Pam wrote:
I had to laugh reading your description. See I'm a big picture person who has worked with micro-focused people. We called them anal. There's no right or wrong here. Just different approaches. You're not going to change them and they aren't going to change you. The best you can do is find some middle ground. I know it's frustrating. Probably for them as much as you. But that's what makes the world go around.

My impression from previous posts, though, is that mattkime IS a big picture person in a very important sense. The elegant code is longer lasting and more cost effective in the long term. The quick fix leaves behind a trail of dirt that someone else will need to pay to clean up later.

It may just take time to build up his reputation as a reliable programmer whose code lasts forever and never breaks.

[mattkime]

It's interesting to see how people read between the lines. I haven't filled in all the details mostly because it would just be boring. It's still useful to see people's responses because they're all describing forces at work on some level. While I was hired as an engineer, I find myself facing more people problems? No, challenges? No, it's not negative at all. It's just not a code problem. Code problems are much quicker to fix than team problems. I need to relax and trust that we'll get where we need to go. Maybe I need to redirect some energy that I was formerly putting into work into a new hobby.

No matter what, these are problems that will keep me employed for a very long time.

[M A V I C]

I'm confused on what the issue is.

Is their code sloppy?

Is the UX/UI they're creating bad?

I recently had someone review my code. They asked for code that was exceptionally pretty. I told them up-front that my code wasn't perfectly formatted everywhere like a work of art (that's what they were requesting.) I explained this was because generally the budget for the project was better spent elsewhere.

That sort of stuff takes time. The end result to the client is that I spent their money making sure everything was indented properly, no extra lines, all comments were consistent... rather than making a difference in many other ways that would actually have an impact on the bottom line.

Pam (and I'm not picking on her) said that "There's no right or wrong here." and I don't think we've been given enough information to determine that. If their work is:
1. Causing more work for their coworkers
2. Creating problems they'll have to deal with down the road
3. Creating a bad user experience
4. Hurting the company's bottom line...

Then what they're doing is clearly wrong. I know people who write the sloppiest CSS and then just use Firebug to sift their way through the mess they created, constantly overriding styles... and that wastes their own time as well as anyone else who has to work on it. That IS wrong.

You have to find out if what they do causes a negative impact like those mentioned above. Then you have to find a way to convey that to them so they are motivated to solve the problem - for their own reasons - not yours. And if they, for example, don't care if it hurts the company's bottom line then you need to take it up with the chain of command. If it doesn't actually cause a problem other than it doesn't match your own personal definition of excellence, put your energy elsewhere.

[haikuman]

mattkime wrote:
I need to relax and trust that we'll get where we need to go. Maybe I need to redirect some energy that I was formerly putting into work into a new hobby.

No matter what, these are problems that will keep me employed for a very long time.

I smell an epiphany,,,,,

I like your style Matt *(:>*

[digby]

mattkime wrote:
... Maybe I need to redirect some energy that I was formerly putting into work into a new hobby.

Or new people!

I'm so much happier since I started getting some new friends. It keeps me from getting depressed when my work "friends" turn out to be just co-workers.