I have interacted with off-shore development teams from a specific country 3 times now. I'll say the country later.<p>Every time the development team could not grasp what was required. You literally had to exchange 20 emails with them for each specific point. Of course, this just increased the length of time for scope and in all cases furthered the time of the project.<p>Each stage of the application was over engineered to infinity. Spaghetti code everywhere and nonsensical functions, callbacks, literally everything was what the hell was the developer thinking.<p>Of course it just about worked. They had to ship something, but it was slow. The UI was painted into a corner, in some cases doing the wrong thing literally crashed the browser because of an infinity loop or took too much memory.<p>Some apps had about a billion dependencies and therefore could never be secure. I'm not kidding either, it's like the developer was a plumber instead of actually knowing how to code the simplest of things.<p>There was no way to ever extend it to build atop newer features or have any sort of roadmap for user requests.<p>In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company. How to solve the problem? Start from scratch with a competent local company with an actual design and development process.<p>Want to know the best bit? One company I know of, who spent $6 million dollars on a project with an Indian company. An in-house developer took 3 months as a side project and rebuilt it from scratch. It ended up being the code from there on in.<p>I have NIH syndrome due to seeing these issues pop-up time and time again. In my career I've seen well over $15-20m being wasted in projects due to management being completely incompetent and thinking sitting on the phone with a dev team will ensure success.
I find a lot of developers seriously lack a professional mentality (I think I'm guilty of this in my youth though I made up for it in dedication and sheer hard work.)<p>Moving towards the business side I hired a lot of interns from commerce/marketing and they made my devs seem like little babies, it was shocking how capable, committed, team-oriented they were. It changed my view of things.<p>It's a matter of culture and perspective, and of course the fact that there is definitely such a thing as 'bad management' ... but Engs do have a tendency to think they know what's best for the product roadmap, and have really strong views about all sorts of things.<p>Some of this is good, in a way, but I really wish somehow the culture of development could be professionalized, both in terms of general approach to working at a company - but also in terms of the artisanal aspects of development itself.<p>It's important to set tone and expecations early, with smaller units it might work ... but as Eng teams get big, then they always end up reporting to Eng and not product, so it really depends on the culture that the VP Eng / CTO has established.
1. Undocumented server setups with passwords saved in their own password manager and refusing to hand passwords and proccess after being fired.<p>2. Hacking the servers after being fired and deleting the data<p>3. Insulting the guy from the marketing/sales/customer service department for lack of technical knowledge.<p>4. Asking the woman from the customer service department to be a cheerleader to up his motivation while he fixed the customer's problem.
Mine wanted to get paid. Can you imagine it? Building the best product ever just wasn't enough.<p>P45's all round and the issue was solved, permanently.
Developer attitude towards spending money on software...<p>"Invented Here Syndrome" when it comes to the choice between writing 50 lines of code vs. pulling in 4mb of client side dependencies to use a giant 3rd party (yet Open Source and therefore Free!) library that incidentally offers a solution to the same problem, after about 50 lines of configuration.<p>vs.<p>"Not Invented Here Syndrome" for anything that involves paying money for anything. Such as that API that solves the exact problem that's blocking us from moving forward, offered by a company that does nothing but solve that problem for a living, because we might outgrow their Free Tier and therefore face potentially thousands of dollars of charges. Argued among half a dozen market-rate developers of a venture funded startup that could really do with having launched yesterday. Rather, let's pause to build our own version of that service first. Then build our product.<p>I tend to notice these things while working as a consultant, and thus something of a bystander in terms of being able to do anything about it.
I have worked in software for 20 years with numerous being very early stage ventures. I would say that most of the problems I’ve faced in software venture is with non-technical founders who, generally speaking, provide minimal value until product-market fit is achieved. This sounds like the kind of question I might have faced in those ventures. If it’s a software venture and the founder is not either a skilled designer, talented product manager, or a developer working very closely together, it’s very unlikely to succeed. Perhaps a better question is “Developers, what is the worst experience you have had with a non-technical founder?”
Our Android developer silently inserted cryptocurrency mining code into the new release, pushed the clean version to github, but submitted the infected version to Google Play.<p>After a few weeks Google caught that and banned our app. We lost thousands of customers and years of work and had to start over with a brand new app. Years later the infected app is still mining cryptocurrency because users ignore Google’s malware warning message and keep using the app.<p>PS: I should have said “our FORMER Android developer.”
Could someone explain to me why this question has gotten so many upvotes? Are bad experiences with developers common?<p>My impression is that most of the time perceived bad experiences with developers comes from being a bad manager.
I had a boss once who conjectured that when you point a finger, there are three pointed back at yourself. I often come in to "rescue" projects after an initial developer or team, and more often than not I find just as many mistakes on the management side. For example - if the developer(s) have set up the production environment using their own personal AWS account, or set up DNS in their own name, yes, they screwed up, but that's the company's IP that management has failed to secure. Problems go both ways.
I hate how whenever I ask them to attend more than two or three meetings a week they start showing up with competing offers.<p>Now I let them invite me to meetings when they think I'll add value, usually by talking through the product roadmap and business metrics.
Was working with a developer through Upwork who claimed to be from Japan. Was in fact from China. Upwork terminated their account without warning, and we owed the individual money. Was a legal and logistical pain in the ass. I guess this is a bad experience with Upwork as much as with a developer.
It's hard to know how to apply the appropriate 'grain of salt' when reading things like this thread. I worked for a small (~40 person) start-up before where there was rampant religious discrimination and inappropriate workplace behavior by executives, even the head of HR who functioned more like a culture gatekeeper to enforce the particular overt religious cultural aspects of the founder.<p>When developers pushed back, they were called uncooperative, threatened with pay cuts or being fired, told they were not team players or were making too big a deal out of things. It was crazy!<p>In my experience, the times when management believe they are suffering from a problem developer are actually reflections of the management. There are exceptions like employee theft, issues with employees after they are terminated, and these things are often pretty black and white. But for all the other types of things that are more subjective about effort or cultural fit or finger pointing or tone or attitude or whatever, I tend to think most employees are absolutely not the problem, rather it is inept management and extremely poor culture mandates.
I’m not a founder, but I think it is not about developers, but rather about personalities (read same things happen everywhere). So, for me the worst things I saw:
Pure incompetence mixed with arrogance
Bad temper - impossible to argue without getting yell at
Chronically ignoring mission and goals (read like doing things they like vs what is needed)
Slacking and lying about it
Lying in general (work, travel, etc)
Psychopathic beghaviours<p>So, in all those cases, I believe, the only way is to say thank you and let go.<p>And i’m IC
We had a developer who worked on one of our projects. After he left, it was a disaster. Our new developers discovered that the names and items he used were strange and not related to what it should do. So the devs needed to go through all codes, figure out what it's doing and rename the code. It took a lot of time...