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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
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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'.
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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.
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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.