How to annoy a developer

If you have you ever wanted to annoy a developer or understand why they begin to act angry and irritated at the normal things you do then this article if for you. It should show you how to keep a developer happy by knowing exactly what annoys them.

Coming from an environment where I find myself in close contact with programmers here are a few things that I have noticed never fails to piss them off.

Make Last-minute additions

I know we are in a dynamic era where it is impossible to plan every single thing before coding starts, but the first step in software development is figuring out what you want the product to do and each time you change requirements with little amounts of add-ons programmers might have to throw out huge chunk of work and and redo work.

Interupt Them Frequently

The work that developers do requires an incredible amount of focus, they wear headsets to fence-off distracting noise and to prevent interruptions. So don’t make any of them remove their headphones something trivial. The headset is a substitute for a signboard that says, “I’m CODING, LEAVE ME ALONE !!!”.

Next time you consider interrupting a developer when they’re clearly in The Zone™. You’re wasting about 15 to 30 minutes of their time because it takes that much time to get back into the zone in addition to the time you spend talking to them.

Enforce Micromanagement

Too much management results in interruptions and waste of valuable time which is a recipe for having a product delivered late. Developers hate it when they are caught in nonstop meetings that an email would easily replace. This results in lost time. They hate managers that do ask for time estimates every hour trying to find out God knows what? You are going more harm than good so trust them they are working on it.

Non-Technical Managers

Developers hate bosses who think that because they know a little bit about a lot of things, they are experts in everything. This kind of bosses make assumptions that make no sense like when the manager keeps repeating that an enormous task is “easy” or tell you that you have to build better software in the same amount of time, “No excuses”. A manager that thinks he needs to add more developers in the project to make it go faster; nine women can’t make a baby in one month. Another good example is when a developer says “I can’t implement this feature now” he simply opens apple.com and show him how apple has done it.

Schudule alot of Meetings

Developers hate being stuck in meetings especially when you make them attend but it has nothing to do with their work. They even don’t like attending meetings that are relevant to them if it could have been replaced with an email or worse the meeting without a clear objective or agenda where people keep bringing up new topics and extending the length.

Documentation and Lack of Documentation

Documentation is crucial for other developers, it is also important for future generations of developers especially if it is code that is meant to be reused, overridden or modified. But many developers hate writing documentation as much as they hate lack of documentation and badly written documentation.

Ask Stupid questions

You will always come across these kinds of people in the office or outside the office. They would come up with questions like “You’re good with computers, right, Can you hack into the government?”, “Why is it taking you so long, I mean don’t you just need to make small changes here and there?” Why is my WiFi slow?

Ask Recurring questions

How does this work again? These kinds of questions never fail to irritate a developer. After explaining stuff to a client or manager, he keeps asking for the same things over and over and acts every time as if he has never heard of any of this stuff before.

Tell them Programming just typing

Stop telling them that you have been watching them for a while now and they are not typing which automatically translates to the fact that they are not working. A developer consulting documentation looks like a person browsing a web page. Programming is not just typing it is more of planning, research, and deep thinking than typing.

Grade Their Performance by line count

Lines Of Code is a bad metric for measuring productivity in software development teams. Sometimes they write negative lines of code per day deleting several lines of bad code and refactoring with shorter lines of optimized code.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight – Bill Gates