Comment by lkrubner
7 years ago
* Your attitude is the exact opposite. *
You setting your theory against my lived experience. If you want to understand the situation more fully, you can read How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps:
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
I did my best to re-create the extent to which decisions were driven by panic and the pressure of time.
Please note, every company in the world has a finite amount of time, and a finite amount of money. You can argue that a company should hire people with more experience, but people with more experience will be more expensive, so you will end up with less people. Or you can argue that a company should hire more people, of less experience, and then train them. Training takes time, so in this case you are trading time for money.
All of these strategies work, but in different circumstances. In the circumstances that I faced in 2015, described in the book, I advocated for the strategy of less people, of a higher skill level. I was, however, outvoted, which is a reality of corporate life.
It is relatively rare that a company follows an ideal strategy. What I see instead is constant course correction, often with a bit of a lag, so that the company ends up having the ideal strategy for dealing with the situation that it faced 6 months ago, which is not necessarily the ideal strategy for what it is facing now.
Business tends to be chaotic. The Platonic Ideal of computer programming needs to be adjust to the real realities that businesses face.
To be clear, Sital's attitude was a major problem, and myself and co-workers advocated that he be fired. But management kept him on, and I was given the responsibility of covering for the gaps in his knowledge. I was not happy about this, but this is a reality of business: we often have to accept that a decision has been made that we strongly disagree with, and then we need to somehow make the best of it.
Well, I see you're adding more and more constraints to suit your point of view. First you attacked git by pointing out some flaws that were only just about people not knowing how it worked. Then you gave a more specific example, where actually, it was in the company's best interest to hire a novice developer who didn't have time to learn git, because he was pressured into focusing on whatever the CEO wanted. Then you argued that really, companies can't hire good people, or train them, or use good practices and we should just use the path of least resistance. At the end of the argument, it wasn't really about git.
The issue you have with git, is that untrained developers have a hard time using it. Which brings me back to my original comment. It really doesn't take long to train someone to use git. And you can choose whatever flow you want. That's the beauty of it. If the company hires lower skill people, you can just guide choose a branching mode suited for their needs. They don't even need to use branches. Or just teach them to use an UI. But please don't teach them SVN.
You don't give a reason for this:
But please don't teach them SVN
Why would you say this?
You also say:
If the company hires lower skill people, you can just guide choose a branching mode suited for their needs
If the company has lower skill people, why not go with the technology that requires less skill? This seems like an obvious step.
Because SVN is painfully slow, bloated and almost nobody uses it anymore. You'd be doing them a disservice by teaching them a technology they most likely won't be able to take with them to their next job.
This is simply untrue:
"The issue you have with git, is that untrained developers have a hard time using it."
Please re-read my first post, up above, which started this thread. I wrote:
"But all of that stuff is trivial compared to the major flaw:
Graphic designers, writers, HTML/CSS frontenders, managers, data analysts and QA staff can’t use Git, even though they all used Subversion."
Ok, I agree, attacked your weakest argument, which you specifically marked as being trivial flaws. So to address your actual issue:
> Graphic designers, writers, HTML/CSS frontenders, managers, data analysts and QA staff can’t use Git, even though they all used Subversion.
Why is it hard for them to use git? For simple use cases, git can be as easy as commit & push. No need for branches. There are even UIs which allow you to easily make commits and see the log [1]. If more people work together and conflicts arise, I honestly don't know how SVN is better at solving them.
[1] https://www.gitkraken.com/
1 reply →
> Sital's attitude was a major problem
Would it be the best if Sital never committed his changes? That way he would not be able to hurt your project and you would be able to fire Sital sooner.
My leadership philosophy is "fire fast". I shouldn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to fire someone, at least not under the rules that hold sway in the USA. Obviously the approach needs to be adjusted to fit with the laws of whatever nation you might be in. But in the USA, the law is lenient towards leadership when leadership wants to fire someone. Therefore, I should have been able to simply fire Sital. Then we would have hired someone good.