<story><title>A Million Lines of Bad Code</title><url>http://varianceexplained.org/programming/bad-code/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swalsh</author><text>I recently read the book &amp;quot;How to Win Friends &amp;amp; Influence People&amp;quot;, bad title great book.  My main take away from this is I&amp;#x27;ve been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years.  I wish I had read this book in middle school.&lt;p&gt;But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn&amp;#x27;t enough if you follow it with a &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start.  I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;will get better results then this&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hey pretty cool program, but you&amp;#x27;re reading in files wrong&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;which even that is better than this&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution&amp;quot; which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AceJohnny2</author><text>I like teaching. I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m amazing at it, but I like sharing knowledge and experience with my friends and co-workers and see them improve, or just sometimes for the abstract sense of helping. Of course, sometimes I fall flat and come across as arrogant or condescending, but I hope that&amp;#x27;s rare. I read &amp;quot;How to make friends&amp;quot; a long time ago, and I apply those rules diligently to my interactions with people.&lt;p&gt;Recently though, I&amp;#x27;ve been assigned a guy to help me with one of my tasks, managing the build pipeline. This requires a wide range of knowledge about unix and scripting (Bash, Perl AND Python. Yup. On top of Makefiles, of course).&lt;p&gt;The guy doesn&amp;#x27;t know how to use a command-line.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised to find myself to be very unhelpful and curt with this guy. He&amp;#x27;s the unlucky recipient of my resentment at the amount of effort I will have to put in before he can actually become remotely helpful. Of course, it doesn&amp;#x27;t help that he&amp;#x27;s in far off timezone where I&amp;#x27;d have to stay up late to help him, and that I have trouble getting direct answers from him about his knowledge level. The communication and experience gap is too large.&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, this is just my two cents relating an experience to show how a seemingly normal and friendly human being can revert to angry &amp;quot;RTFM&amp;quot;s.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Million Lines of Bad Code</title><url>http://varianceexplained.org/programming/bad-code/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swalsh</author><text>I recently read the book &amp;quot;How to Win Friends &amp;amp; Influence People&amp;quot;, bad title great book.  My main take away from this is I&amp;#x27;ve been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years.  I wish I had read this book in middle school.&lt;p&gt;But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn&amp;#x27;t enough if you follow it with a &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start.  I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;will get better results then this&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hey pretty cool program, but you&amp;#x27;re reading in files wrong&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;which even that is better than this&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution&amp;quot; which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cperciva</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I usually hear this referred to as a &amp;quot;criticism sandwich&amp;quot;: Criticism surrounded on either side with compliments.</text></comment>