Perpetual Novice Developers

I have been in the software development industry for a number of years now and I consider myself a moderately seasoned developer. I have experience with several different languages and I try to learn something new every day. I have seen most types of code, and sadly a large majority of it is crap. I understand that sometimes you simply must make an app work and work now, but there is no way that this happens often enough to merit what I've seen throughout my career.

I'm not under any delusions about the causes of this bad code; there are a million reasons. The deadline was too short. The requirements were too vague. We just hired a whole group of COBOL developers to write our enterprise level Java app because they were cheaper (and no, I'm not joking on this one). While these are likely the biggest issues, there is another that could be stopped before it begins.

This post got me thinking about the topic. Besides the code I've actually seen and had to deal with, I have now been part of more interviews on the "I've already got a job" side of the table than the "please hire me" side. The years of experience listed on the resume usually mean nothing at all. Occasionally you will hit on the right combination, but normally there are numerous caveats that come along with those "15 years of .Net experience and an expert in SQL." The saddest part of this is the developer in question generally believes they truly have loads of experience they are bringing to the table. 

If someone with the attitude of knowing more than anyone else in the room is brought in, it can easily become toxic to a development team. Any insight that comes from an outside source is quickly objected to even before any discussion begins. Where is the motivation for anyone else on the team to put any of their ideas forward in this situation? This will lead to poorly executed projects and crap code in most cases, and this could have been prevented on the front end.

How can you get through to someone who falls into the perpetual novice bucket?