Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m currently working on a really exciting and fun software development project with several highly competent peers. Two of them, however, like to operate open loop and plow ahead with minimal collaboration with the more disciplined (and hence, slower) developers. These dudes not only insert complex designs and code into their components without vetting their ideas before the rest of the team, they have no boundaries. Like elephants in a china shop, they tramp all over code in everybody else’s “area of ownership”.

“He who touches the code last, owns it.” — Anonymous

Because of the team cohesion that it encourages, I’m all for shared ownership, but there has to be some nominal boundary to arrest the natural growth in entropy inherent in open loop systems and to ensure local and global conceptual integrity.

Even though these colleagues are rogues, they’re truly very smart. So, I’m learning from them, albeit slooowly since they don’t document very well (surprise!) and I have to laboriously reverse engineer the code they write to understand what the freak they did. Even though feelings aren’t allowed, I “feel” for those dudes who come on board the project and have to extend/maintain our code after we leave for the next best thing.