I'm pretty pissed off. I was ranted at today over something that I find stupid and a waste of my time - the formatting of code comments. We use eclipse and use the code formatter and "save actions" so people don't have to waste their time doing something that the IDE can do for them automatically. The behaviour in question is that the person would spend (apparently) a lot of time formatting their comment with indents and when the save actions would kick in they would lose all of this formatting.
I typically use the // style of comments, even for multiline comments. Why? Because it's easy with ctrl-shift-c. Boom, it's done. The other person insists that they use the /* */ style comments. Why? Because that's what they've done for 15 years. And they told me that there was nothing that I can say to change their mind. I, and the other 40 developers, had to change how we do things. Quoting years of doing something a given way as a reason for continuing to do it is a really shitty reason. It's a wonder how we as a species ever moved out of the trees or caves.
Now, I was pretty ticked at this point. Why? A number of reasons, but # 1 being that they didn't even want to discuss things. It was black and white in their head. End of story. Full stop. (I don't think that they actually said this, but that's what it felt like.) Aside: if someone says "end of story, full stop" it usually means that they are 1) a jackass and 2) wrong.
The best part about the whole thing? Perhaps the only good thing actually: I learned something new about java today. I learned that if you do slash star dash like: /*- NOTICE THE DASH! */ it will keep the indents. Who knew you were supposed to write java code like that? Apparently Sun / Oracle.
So, here I am probably like 10 hours later still pissed off. Still wasting my time thinking about it. Which pisses me off. Loop.
I love helping people, but gods people help yourselves first. It's fine to come to with a problem. Ideally come with proposed solutions. Come to rant, but not to rant at me. But don't come to me with a closed mind. I can't fix that.
I feel your pain. One of the more important things that I've learned over the last few years is that a lot of 'work' is simply about choosing your battles.
ReplyDeleteI find doing this seems to eliminate 90% of my work-related stress.
It would have been nice if I had a choice about this one rather than someone showing up at my desk, very, very angry, and them telling me that they just wanted to rant at me. Helpful.
ReplyDeleteI can understand about being angry about a lot of things. Formatting for code comments isn't one of them.
My thought is that if you're writing a big comment block *inside* a method, that's a good indication that the chunk of code should be it's own method. If you need a lot of comments explaining that code, it should also have a bunch of unit tests that "explain" it.
*sigh*