Other day on Twitter I ran into some retweets about "10x programmers" by some people who are not known for their coding, but rather complaining on Twitter. Since I followed them before I know partially their work history, or more like their brief stints, at different well known game tech companies.
This made me think about recent phenomenon of programmers who seem to be working on games with existing codebases their whole career, without significant contribution to any of those code bases, but who are very vocal and opinionated about things in those code bases.
Some traits of Yelp programmers are:
- Brief stints at different game companies.
- Resume has "defined strategy for a new project" or something that anyone experienced will know it's not used by anyone other than person who "defined" it.
- Whole work history is in existing code bases, mostly maintaining existing code.
- Never produced any significant systems from scratch, only maybe added new feature to existing system.
- Existing code is always only "tech debt" that hinders their productivity.
- They are really interested in processes, methodologies, and leadership, coding is not that important for them.
- They are idea people, they spend a lot of time at meetings, brainstorming, designing, etc. but not coding.
- Their work output are Yelp style code "reviews", and complains about existing code. Those "reviews" don't contain any suggestions of how to improve code.
- If there is some code lacking in existing code base, this was obviously done to hinder their "productivity".
- They ask "why we do x", and worry a lot.
The reason why I call it 'Yelp programmer' is because they seem to behave like Yelp reviewer who is frustrated with restaurant. They are there to ding the restaurant from spite, but their reviews are usually useless to restaurants and others who are reading them.
Now I don't really understand why these people do this at all. For me this is fairly recent phenomenon. In the past I've seen people who would be frustrated by some code, they would vent, and then they were able to take charge and come up with some solution about it. I used to ask people at interviews what's game/engine system they hated the most at their previous game, and how they would they do it better. I asked this because I've seen awesome code produced from anger at some existing code. But this venting without following with solution is something completely new to me...
Is this really something new, or I just never seen it before?