Re:The Worst Programmer
by mgaunard on Sunday September 03, 2023 @07:40AM
(#37369585)
It was in banking, we had built a successful strategy in the front-office and senior management was unhappy with software engineers reporting to trading rather than IT (they didn't start caring until we generated significant revenue).
So they moved all existing engineers to IT management, which also started bringing new engineers to the team, this one first.
Within a year everyone from the former team left -- new management made a good job of alienating them -- so I imagine he did maintain a large coding responsibility for a while until they hired more to support him.
It all comes down to the fact that building new good code is hard, but once it's done, having cheap people with superficial understanding is enough, and gives the illusion of being better for end-users too as they are more willing to do whatever hack is asked for, since they don't understand the overall design anyway.
So they moved all existing engineers to IT management, which also started bringing new engineers to the team, this one first.
Within a year everyone from the former team left -- new management made a good job of alienating them -- so I imagine he did maintain a large coding responsibility for a while until they hired more to support him.
It all comes down to the fact that building new good code is hard, but once it's done, having cheap people with superficial understanding is enough, and gives the illusion of being better for end-users too as they are more willing to do whatever hack is asked for, since they don't understand the overall design anyway.