Comments go out of date because of bad developers.
The same people who do the bare minimum for tests not to explode. But won’t add a new test case for the new branches they just introduced.
The same people who will mangle the code base introducing bizarre dependencies or copy paste the same piece of code rather than refactor.
People who fail to handle errors correctly. My favorite: by wrapping code in a if statement without an else. (else? Get a weird error without logs! Miles away from the call site!)
People who don’t validate inputs.
People who don’t give a monkey about adding context to errors making the thing impossible to debug in prod when they explode.
People who are too lazy or in incompetent to do their job properly and will always jump at the opportunity to save 5 minutes now but waste 5 hours of everybody else’s time later. Because of course these people can’t fix their own bugs!
And of course these are the people who make comments go out of date. I’ve seen them implement a thing literally the line below a TODO or FIXME comment and not delete the line.
Comments going out of date is a shit excuse for not writing comments as far as I’m concerned.
The fact that some people are incompetent should not drive engineering decisions. You should always assume a minimal level of competency.
> Comments going out of date is a shit excuse for not writing comments as far as I’m concerned.
I agree.
> Comments go out of date because of bad developers
I disagree.
Comments can also go out of date because
- developer is having a really shit time atm and their head is not in the game (bad looking after people management)
- developer is on a one day a week contract and doesn’t have the time in their contract to write big header comments explaining nuances (bad strategy)
- developer thought it looked obvious to them but it’s not obvious at review time (developer is being classic human)
- developer is getting pushed to deliver the thing now now now (bad workload management)
Most of those are the result of some decision made by someone who was not the developer (they’re all real cases). And they are the “non-code blockers” that good managers solve for us, so we can focus on getting good stuff done.
I’ve been where it seems like you are at. Blaming others for being bad didn’t help me. I had to lower my expectations of others, keeping my expectations for myself. Then get on about teaching willing people how they could be better. Might be making a few assumptions/projecting a bit there, but that’s my experience with “bad developers”.
Being any type of “leader” is lonely. Whether that’s an official role assigned to you or not. Or if it’s just a skill level thing. No one can quite match up to the expectations or understand what we see and why. But explaining it goes a long way with the right ones.
The same people who do the bare minimum for tests not to explode. But won’t add a new test case for the new branches they just introduced.
The same people who will mangle the code base introducing bizarre dependencies or copy paste the same piece of code rather than refactor.
People who fail to handle errors correctly. My favorite: by wrapping code in a if statement without an else. (else? Get a weird error without logs! Miles away from the call site!)
People who don’t validate inputs.
People who don’t give a monkey about adding context to errors making the thing impossible to debug in prod when they explode.
People who are too lazy or in incompetent to do their job properly and will always jump at the opportunity to save 5 minutes now but waste 5 hours of everybody else’s time later. Because of course these people can’t fix their own bugs!
And of course these are the people who make comments go out of date. I’ve seen them implement a thing literally the line below a TODO or FIXME comment and not delete the line.
Comments going out of date is a shit excuse for not writing comments as far as I’m concerned.
The fact that some people are incompetent should not drive engineering decisions. You should always assume a minimal level of competency.