I'm just not piecing it together. The author was told:
>In the future, stay the Hell out of other people's code.
But then says:
>Actually it was terrible advice, advice that I've gone out of my way to ignore in the years since. But those words were valuable nevertheless, and I've gone back to them time and again.
So was that advice bad and why? Or did it end up being useful, and why?
The advice was bad. But it was useful in helping him maintain perspective any time another engineer had comments about how crappy his code was. His instinct was to give them the same advice, but his brain would override reminding him of why that's bad advice to give.
It also helped him understand politics in a company, and how it gets in the way of certain types of progress.
Really? It doesn't take much to see that he used the opposite of that advice in order to make sure he was attentative to new hires insights and to criticism's about his own code.
Everytime someone comes up and says his code sucks he remembers being a young engineer admonished for making someone's code better, and instead of getting defensive, he listens.
I see how it's counter intuitive - almost seems as if the author is contradicting himself. But it did drive a point home, especially that last sentence. This is what I took away from it:
You may be able to come up with better ways to do things, but that often means replacing or voiding the efforts of coworkers or bosses. People have fragile egos, and may feel their job is being threatened since you are arranging things more efficiently. This could churn office politics, and cause problems that have little to do with the job itself (emotionally compromised workers and shifting hierarchy).
Likewise, it is our responsibility to embrace the skills of fellow workers in order to enhance workflow. There is no such thing as superiority if you're a member of a team. Kill the ego and think about constant improvement for the group
> but that often means replacing or voiding the efforts of coworkers or bosses.
Comment: Having a work environment where people up discard and replace the the work other people have done is really really bad for moral. If you let that stuff happen continually you'll end up with a team where no one cares or takes ownership of anything.
More than irony, it's a paradox: the advice was so bad that it was useful, because he had no doubt it was bad and it was received in dramatic circumstances so he will always remember to do exactly the opposite.
I stand corrected. I read and understand such devices, but it's been so long since I had to formally identify them that I just go for the basics. As an aside, as time goes on, I find myself valuing more and more the ability to read and write beyond the purely literal. The literal can be so inelegant and inefficient, but sometimes it feels like anything beyond the literal can be perceived almost as a foreign language, and if the person with whom one is communicating never learned that language, it's all Greek. I suppose its like an add-on to one's language that's learned in Literature classes, or rhetoric classes, or Classics.
>In the future, stay the Hell out of other people's code.
But then says:
>Actually it was terrible advice, advice that I've gone out of my way to ignore in the years since. But those words were valuable nevertheless, and I've gone back to them time and again.
So was that advice bad and why? Or did it end up being useful, and why?