Thursday, November 28, 2013: From clients to bosses, everyone wants a programmer to deliver their products in the shortest of time! But it seems that anyone hardly cares about the needs of developers to get the job done. From pointless meetings to useless productivity parameters and know nothing bosses, here are 10 biggest hindrances to a successful programming project.
1. Meetings
In the survey by CIO, a majority of developers readily agreed that meetings are the biggest factor which acts as a roadblock and kills their productivity time. Bosses preaching on every little detail and co-programmers going on and on about petty bugs or features or architecture is a let down.
2. Reading And Replying All Emails
Agreed that meetings are bad but so are their alternative, that is emails. Discussing everything on emails and then going through all those mail trails can be a bigger killer! And while there are options of skipping of blocking the mails, that way you can even miss some important communication.
3. Useless productivity measures
There comes a time when managers suddenly start to count your commits and lines of code or number of bug fixes. And if you are putting up programmers in this gameplay, they instead of making the code better, start to concentrate on increasing the writing lines and solving bugs or doing whatever is being counted. So such measurements instead of boosting the productivity can encourage the programers to create long files of overly engineered codes.
4. The First Coders
If there is one person at work who can be worse than your boss then he is the person who was working on these codes earlier and then left. If you are trying to understand what the code was all about, he will make sure that it sounds as bad it can be. And trying to understand the basic function of the program via them can be a big time productivity killer!
5. Nonprogrammer managers
While some programmers are happy about having non programmer managers as they are easy to make excuses to, others say that these guys just call meetings and get in the way. Some blame them for not giving enough guidance.
6. Programming pro boss
This was an obvious on the list as those who love non programmer managers, hates those who are pro in programming. These former geniuses often micromanage the project and want to change almost everything that you create. Result: Productivity killed!
7. Programmer v/s programmer
“You can’t always blame it on others,” say a lot of respondents of the survey. Many programmers often lock their horns on pettiest of features without even considering what the client actually wants. And what suffers in this battle of two is again productivity.
8. Poor Documentation
Yes, we understand that documentation takes a little time but imagine getting into someone’s code without having any documentation. It surely is when you have to try and err and understand what feature do what. Infact for the current coders also documenting it all at end might be even more time consuming. A well explained documentation which is updated time to time will help you to retain which coding was for what and will save a lot of time.
9. Circus atmosphere
This specially happens when you are sent to the client’s office to work and they make you sit at a place which is full of distractions. Be it new trainees or next to pantry. Yes, these things kills productivity big time!
10. Clinging to historic technologies
There still are project leads that want you to code in a technology that should better be placed in museums. Out of many purposes of the upcoming languages, one is definitely meant to cut down on time and effort. And here if you are stuck to older ones that need even deeper analysis and reading by the programmer, it is definitely a productivity killer!
