I just coined a new phrase

[Gendo]

My day was a shit sandwich with really good bread.

The meaning is pretty obvious, but basically the beginning and end of my day were both great, but a really crappy day in between.

[sikax]

No matter how good your bread is, a shit sandwich is going to taste completely terrible, making the quality of the bread meaningless. The superiority of your bread is rendered obsolete by the fact that it's housing shit.

[Gendo]

So more about this now.

Last week I had a bad day. I could have posted about it to rant then, but I didn't. Basically, 4 weeks ago we had a team meeting where we discussed coding standards. I thought the standards we were discussing were way too specific, and they were the type of things that should just be left up to developer discretion. I voiced my concerns about it, but that was it.

Anyway, last week we had another meeting; where the same topic came up. The team (my boss was not in this meeting) decided on 2 more standards that we wanted to implement. Things that were not only way too specific, but were also just wrong. Programming is as much an art as a science; it's a creative process. The types of standards we were deciding on was like giving an author a list of words he's not allowed to use in his next book; or telling a painter he can only paint on a paint-by-numbers paper. They were things that would require extra work with no benefit. I voiced my opinion again; saying that the things they wanted were not good code, and that each developer should be able to work in his own style on these types of things. I was heard, but outvoted.

Well I was upset. A lot. It wasn't just that I wasn't getting my way; but these types of things would have simply made my job worse. Bad enough that I had real concerns as to if I was willing to just suck it up and do things this way. As this job is still really new (5 weeks now), I wasn't sure how to approach this as the new guy. I didn't think I'd be able to change the team's mind, despite having done research into these things showing that Microsoft themselves (the creator of the language/framework we're using), as well as the programming community at-large, all agreed that my style is preferred and recommended. I was worried about just talking to my boss about it, because I didn't want the other team members to feel like I just ignored what they'd decided on and gone over their heads.

Anyway, yesterday I just decided to meet with my boss about it. I told him all the same concerns I just told you. And well, he agreed with me 100%. He said he'd had the same concerns from 4 weeks ago when this was first discussed. He didn't know that it had been discussed again last week; and he seemed slightly annoyed that we were spending/wasting time discussing this stuff in the first place. He agreed with me both on the idea that these types of standards aren't useful, and also on the specifics about how the standards that were being chosen were the opposite of the way good coding should be in practice.

So bam. I was so relieved. Now I am still concerned about the possibly awkwardness when he talks to the team about this stuff. When he tells them that we shouldn't be using these standards, they may or may not know that I went to talk to him about it. But either way, they'll know that my boss agrees with me, and I don't know how much of a problem they'll have with it.

[Gypsy-Vanner]

Nobody likes a snitch.

[aels]

Bosses do. I learnt from school that it doesn't matter if all the other kids hate you, so long as the teacher thinks you're hot shit

[BruceSmith78]

Fuck 'em. You didn't go over their heads, you told them to their faces they were wrong. Going over their heads would have been not saying shit about it and just running straight to the boss.

[sikax]

Yeah fuck that. I hate it when people are concerned about image and who's talking to whom when the actual job and procedures remain fucked up. I don't give a god damn about saving face if speaking up makes things run more smoothly. Everyone in my office seems to be afraid of our boss and never tells her anything that's on their mind, even if it would benefit everyone. I tell her immediately when something isn't being done properly and that it needs to be changed. More often than not she's understanding and, if it's a good idea, will implement it. And then we go on with our lives.