[0675] Mediation
└ posted on Thursday, 16 April 2015, by Novil
- HR lady: The first step in mediation is the exchange of your feelings in a non-judgmental environment. Richard, you may go first.
- Richard: Melody’s code makes me nauseated. It’s so ugly, the Free Software Foundation forbade making it open source.
- Melody: Oooohh, is weepy widdle Richard angry because his crummy piece of code is 57% slower than mine?!
- HR lady: In step two, the mediator chugs a bottle of vodka.
- Richard: Her code also has so many security holes, the Adobe Flash team has been called in to make it more secure.
![[0675] Mediation](/comics/2015-04-16-0675-mediation.png "[0675] Mediation")
Rasimpson wrote:
Security vulnerabilities and Speed are usually Separate Issues.
The Security Problems usually come from using OS “Features” that should never have been allowed in the first place.
The Speed issues usually result from really Poor Coding Practices that the person responsible should learn to avoid.
In my own experience optimizing software for better response times, if you Ask the person who Wrote the code in question: “Why’d you do it That Way?” you most frequently hear: “Because that’s the way my College Professor Insisted we do it. He’d cut your grade if you did it any Other Way.”
Yeah. A lot of College Professors have some Really Lousy programming habits and they keep Teaching them as “The One True Way”.
@ Vitor:
I wanted one to, however I’m kind of liking where this is going.
but it doesn’t mean there can’t be an axe battle later.
@ Greenwood Goat:Document it and call it a feature!
Melody’s rewriting Richard’s code reminded me of the time a female co-worker felt she had to reorganize my desk. It’s an invasion of space. Imo, Richard’s code is more readable.
{
Maybe because I code the same way, 😉
}
I’m an C++ embedded systems programmer so my code has to be small and tight. Since I am talking directly to the hardware I usually end up bit twiddling so sort routines. My code has to be readable to be easily debugged. I doubt Melody is an MIT robotics engineer (I attended MIT) because her code technique sucks! Maybe Richard should suggest HR vet her resume.
Danny (Boy) wrote:
So what? Such skills are utterlly uncessary for them – and btw the sooner the company realizes and does not bother them by “people” interactions the more productive they become.
Well, I should substitute “them” by “us”. Socialization is waste of time.
I would like to point out a grammer issue. Unless the mediator is the stereotypical soviet(that means she should be communist). She doesn’t simply chug vodka, it’s called “going to the hospital with” vodka. Please note that.
REALLY though, no one chugs vodka. Vodka is lethal to some people. I think she meant that she was going to the hospital.
Okay, I have little to no idea what these two have been yakking about the last few comics, but I have a feeling Richie here just made the coding war turn cold.
This is the best. And then woo ruins all of her shirts that disagree with Richard’s point of view, and he gets Melody new shirts that are so programmy that only Richard can understand them. Greenwood Goat wrote:
@ Paeris Kiran:
My experience with other tech guys is that we usually get along just fine if you leave us to ourselves. The friction tends to happen in the interface to non-tech-guys who expect us to play their stupid status games and conform to their pointless social conventions.
I’d say it’s not lack of social skills per se, it’s more like there are two different species on the planet that mostly look alike but get along with each other about as easily as cats and dogs.
I have never seen one of the typical holy wars escalate beyond amicable teasing. I must admit that I would get pretty pissed if someone changed my indentation style without even asking, but programmers with enough experience to have an opinion about coding style tend to also have enough sense not to mess with anybody else’s code for no good reason. Seriously, it’s like insulting a mafiosi’s mother. You just don’t.
@ The man, man.:
I didn’t know, per se, but I’d figured that out via context.
Paeris Kiran wrote:
I used to be of the same opinion, and still am, to a degree. My job is to produce code, not to play games with my coworkers, boss, whatever. If I didn’t have to spend as much of my day writing emails and discussing things with other people, I could focus more on getting more, better code written.
I still stand by that concept, but I’ve come to realize that there really is no getting around human interaction. When employed by The Man, the ones paying your salary are people, and they want more feedback than just your code, which they don’t understand. When self-employed, you still have your customers with whom to interact. And completely regardless of your employment situation, software needs users or there is zero point to it except personal enrichment.
I won’t deny that being left alone to do my work is a very attractive idea – I just don’t see how it’s practically possible, or even truly desirable. If you are sent information on what your next tasks are electronically and you never need any elaboration (and thus human interaction), you’ll be treated as just a cog. Even if that’s fine from a self-worth standpoint, cogs aren’t paid very well 🙂
TL;DR: Word, bro. Totally sucks, but we’re kinda stuck.
Plot twist: Richard dates the mediator.
Chrome dumped Unity and Flash for HTML5. I tried playing a 3D HTML5 game that is equally as good (visuals-wise) as Freefall Tournament and my browser crashed into a pile of scrap.
For comparison, Freefall Tournament looks like Halo Combat Evolved.
Damn, Richard, that’s low.
The sign of a true HR rep…Alcoholism.
Why is pearls before swine in the tags?
What is going on between Cloud and Sandra lately? We haven’t heard of them for quite a while.
I’ve gotta be honest, this storyline does not even slightly work for me and with each update I hope it’s over.
LoL
I’m glad this arc is about programming and stuff.
I’ve been doing a lot of it recently.
These really made my day. Thanks
Is anyone else strongly reminded of this Pearls Before Swine strip? I’m guessing yes, since PBS is a tag. http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2008/06/13
@ YSnipes:
Yeah i know man. I kinda want then to fall in love and bang as well.
abowden wrote:
Vitor wrote:
Body spray or body wash?
this reminds me of a story i read on a website called “the daily WTF” (worse than failure) that collects stories about stupid programs, stupid business practices, and silly error messages…
the story is called “a shining PERL”, about someone trying to improve a very slow program that took over 10 minutes to run. the main problem was a ridiculously complicated subroutine that took 7 minutes to run. after working on it for nearly 4 hours, he finally found that the last line of the subroutine was…to multiply by ZERO!
in short, the whole routine was a complete waste of time, so he replaced it with “if 1 equals 2, calculate zero” and a comment, (only run this if you’ve lost your mind).
Paeris Kiran wrote:
True when this strip was published, when it was released, and now.