Monkey Coding

Tue, 17 Jan 2012

I find myself in this pickle from time to time. When I engage a project, too late to find out it was built by monkeys. Sometimes I go through code and It blows my mind how sloppy some of these chimpanzees are. How did they ever get a position programming in the first place? Their skills were certainly untested. I would not be surprised at them eating bananas during their interview.

Building upon someone else's code is never very enjoyable, it's always a pleasure to start from scratch. The problem I see is that nobody I come after follows any standards. Why use gif's and png's in projects? Pick one or the other. Why have duplicated files all over one project? Clean it up. Why have Client-Side JS logic scattered throughout random pages? Dedicate a folder for JS usage. Why name everything on a whim? Use a naming convention. Why not comment written code? Comment it!

I see three categories of programmers. Here they are:

1. The slob - This person cares nothing about their work and is only their for a paycheck. What happens afterwards matters little to them, they are just putting their time in. More bugs means a more secure job, since they are tailored to this persons way of writing illogical code, they are the only ones who can fix it.

2. The scatterbrain - Although these programmers tend to be very smart and the best at solving complex problems while getting things done quickly - they are all over the map with what they are doing. They do not consider another person may have to work on their own work at some point, and if they do, they usually aren't very good at making it usable for the next guy despite what they may think.

3. The slowpoke - These guys are very organized and can explain why they did what they did, however they work very slow and often look bad when crunch time comes. Their greatest fault is they want to be a perfectionist and they waste too much time on minute details. They can also be too picky.

If there is a programmer that possesses number's 2 and 3, they would be the perfect programmer. I have not met one yet, not even myself.