How to burn out your coder!

So this is kind of my response to some guys blog about the mistakes he made which led to the downfall of a project just before release. This was just one of many similar failures he's had. I don't think he's wrong he quotes a lack of vision among other things. He also mentions that they lost their coder. With the coder gone they have no idea how stuff works. This is a bit of a trigger for me because coding is always thought of as the easy thing traditionally and all the premadonna creatives are the real bones of the project. Which is complete bull as I'll explain later. I believe I know exactly what happened as it happens all the time at work. A project is put together and the brief is fairly straight forward. There will be a specific task to automate. I'll ask for the exact requirements but they'll be that vague unless you know the industry you wouldn't even be able to start. So I knock out the entire thing tested in a couple of weeks. At which point there are the ineviatable tweeks which only occur to people once you've done for some bizarre reason. But you designed the code properly so the tweaks take minutes. I have been known to bang out a new feature before the meeting is over. All the time this is going on you're in a meeting with 15 other people. You're the only coder. The document guy asks you to document stuff as he doesn't understand or it takes him the entire project to do one page equivalent of an A4 piece of paper. The QA guys are asking for test documents because they don't undertstand and there are process people doing absolutely nothing as their miniscule actions sit in the outstanding column for weeks. Then it happens and this is where the lack of vision comes in or as we like to call them 'requirements'. It'll be something like, 'the user feedback is poor', considering user feedback wasn't a thing because it was meant to be kicked off by an API it is a little annoying. So you throw in some logging, then the user mentions that it takes 5 minutes when he takes 2 minutes. Despite the code removing the 2 weeks prep the engineer does prior to the 2 minutes. Then the immortal words where is the saving from doing all this? Well it was meant to be you bud but for some reason the process now dictates you sit there and watch the automation on over time. Then there are features missing that were never asked for and the design is compromised. So now your nice design is a maintenance nightmare. The project hands over and the guy is still sat there doesn't use it as he still wants his overtime and doesn't want to be automated and the entire thing was a massive waste of time. They then blame the code as it took too long. Despite none of the processes being in place to support and enforce its use to get the saving. So the coder has worked their backside of while people sit on the sidelines watching for 6 months collecting a pay check. If a meeting with 15 people generates 30 actions and 29 are for the coder then really the rest of the team is superfluous. There is your real saving.

That is a little bit of specific example but it happens with projects all the time. Code needs to have a design, so if you don't have a clear vision or 'requirements' your code is junk at the end and it'll be a miracle if it works. Having ten people in a project and only one coder where everyone wants the limelight and the coder is treated like the toilet cleaner doing 90% of the work isn't going to end well. At work you have to suck it up mostly (although my bro walked off a project because the customer was clueless). In an Indie game project where people's day jobs are different the coder will walk and you'll find out how important they were. Even if your 90% done like the project described by the Indie 'developer' you're dead in the water as the last 10% walked. 10 people watching one guy work is is no longer a thing. For a coder to bring a game to fruition they needed £200 an hour artists and sound guys. With the advent of AI those roles can be done much easier by a coder. The response will be well ChatGPT can code. The answer to that it is yes it can be you'll have the same issue. No requirements, no one has yet got AI to generate requirements, that is the piece that is missing and that is the esoteric value a coder adds. Getting the nonsense out of people's heads in to a design is the trick, after that the code writes itself. The lines of code are just the end product and about 15% of the work. Getting the design and mechanics to work is the bulk of the work. Just as a side note the work project that took 12 months and was eventually archived. I'm actually delivering it again. As they've decided to make that saving because their team is overloaded.