Even though it is practically impossible to write bug-free source code, some people really think they do.
It was the case of one of my former colleagues from a company for which I have worked for a couple of years. He was really thinking that he was extremely skilled (and he was… but not as much as he thought), which unfortunately for him, has led him to adopt a quite arrogant and distant attitude towards everybody. And I mean everybody, as you are about to discover later on.
Durig a tremendously difficult installation for an important customer – a pretty big hypermarket which had just opened – the service team has discovered a blocker bug within the system: transactions weren’t properly saved to the application’s database. After spending a considerable amount of time in order to properly reproduce and describe the problem, it came out that there was a problem in one of this guy’s modules. So they called the company’s HQ and described him the problem.
Well, this is where arrogance and ignorance came in. He totally denied that the problem existed, even though the service people were looking straight at it. There was no bug. They’ve uselessly struggled to convince him, but the problem was so big that they had to escaladate the issue. As ridiculous at it may sound, it was the CEO himself who tried to convince him to look after the problem. Even then, he kept denying that there was a bug, and only when the boss became really “persuasive”, he took a look at the source files.
It appeared that his code did have bugs.
So when you’re thinking your code is perfect… better think you didn’t test it properly.
Title picture © Alexandr Anastasin | Dreamstime.com
#1 by Andrei Rinea on September 8, 2008 - 5:46 PM
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Do you use tests (unit tests, regression tests, integration tests) there?
#2 by alexrosiu on September 20, 2008 - 6:34 PM
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Yes, we were using regression and integration tests.
#3 by Ranjan Banerji on December 8, 2008 - 6:24 AM
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In my experience there is an inverse relationship between developer arrogance and quality of code.
As you said, they guy may be good but his arrogance exceeded his skills. I see that all the time.
I look at bugs as a learning experience. They help you write better unit tests, help you rethink your approach, and improve process.
#4 by Pikesville Paesano on December 30, 2008 - 4:34 PM
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I’ve worked with ‘brilliant’ developers, who had convinced me at the time they were smarter and more technically advanced than I, but after they moved on and I took over their legacy code, I realized there is a huge difference between ‘genius’ and ‘clever’.
#5 by Eric Price on January 21, 2010 - 2:47 AM
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This guy obviosly worked for some Euro
enterprise.
You would have be fired asap in the States
for that kind of attitude, CEOs DON’T tell
their software engineers there is a bug in
_their_ code. I don’t care how good or
arrogant the software engineer is.
My guess is: that it’s harder to fire people
in Europe.