DEV Community

Cover image for What Are Some Warning Signs of a Dysfunctional Coding Environment?
Ben Halpern Subscriber for CodeNewbie

Posted on with Erin A Olinick

What Are Some Warning Signs of a Dysfunctional Coding Environment?

Have you ever experienced a toxic or dysfunctional coding culture? What made it challenging to work in that environment, and how did you respond to it? How did it affect your work and your motivation, and what lessons did you learn from that experience?

In your opinion, what are some key factors that contribute to a positive and healthy coding culture, and how can teams and organizations work to create that kind of environment?


Follow the CodeNewbie Org and #codenewbie for more awesome discussions and online camaraderie!

Top comments (5)

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

Between devs, look at pull requests, that's where you will see people fighting

How to Use a Code Review to Execute Someone's Soul - DaedTech

Collapse
 
hwolfe71 profile image
Herb Wolfe

Not having a plan or architecture other than to make it look like the system it was replacing. My first job as a software engineer involved working on an inventory database system for a warehouse using Visual Foxpro. We finished working on an upgrade, and the next version was to be written in Java. My part was to make the screens to look like the VFP ones. I ended up leaving before the project got very far. I heard later from a co-worker that they ended up putting in a lot of long days to get it finished on schedule.

Collapse
 
andresbecker profile image
Andres Becker • Edited

No focus on the job to be done: Only focus on organizational politics

Collapse
 
theaccordance profile image
Joe Mainwaring

I can’t recall dysfunctional coding culture in my experiences, but I have very much encountered dysfunctional product culture, which has a direct impact on feature development.

Collapse
 
pierrewahlberg profile image
Pierre Vahlberg

I am experiencing, to some degree, fast paced sloppy devs who cause issues for more orderly and thorough devs. The fast ones throw themselves over FP/OOP concepts, new 3rd party services, (gpt!,) and buzzwords. Some are even experineced as developers but when it comes to designing reliable internal software and integrations, it really sets people off when they deviate from the stack, gets ideas shot down from people who actually consider pros and cons, and gets their asses chewed when breaking prod over and over for not thinking over/talking about code or designs.

This is really hard cause I wanna feed the drive (as tech and team lead) but also keep the systems working, maintainable and not all over the cloud api sphere.

Much to my dislike, these people tend to avoid taking up discussions and even skipping Merge Reviews since they are senior devs, and it causes more frustration across the team.