That Developer

A couple of years ago, when I first joined my current group, it was small. Everybody knew each other and the work they did. Mind you, I was new and unproven, eager to show my competence and receptive to any feedback that I received.

During that time, I worked on a feature that required a lot of thinking and fairly complicated code. One afternoon, after spending hours bouncing ideas, designing, reviewing, and coding, I checked in my progress before heading home. It was one of those check ins that gave a sense of accomplishment and made me feel good. But after dinner and taking a shower, I came back to my computer to find a reply email to my check in. And the sender was no less than the top engineer of the group.

Shivering, I opened the email. It was two pages long. On a 30 inch monitor. And the screen full of letters appeared to spell out in every detail why my code was completely garbage.

My first reaction was that I had made a mistake to join the group. After all, if the top engineer thought I was a dumb ass then what chance did I have? But then I started thinking about the integrity of my work and realized that even after having read the email I stood by it. So I gathered myself and started writing a reply to every single point made in the review mail.

Soon after I sent the email, probably after  just long enough for the sender to have read through my reply, I got another response. It read, “Okay, that makes sense.” But I did have to go back on his feedback and make quite a few improvements.

We’ve all come a long way since then. And now our group is large enough that I do not get to work with that top engineer directly as much, which is my loss. In any case, I like to think that I have earned his trust to do good work. And now I remember my little “war story” with fondness and share it with people to remind myself never to get too comfortable. But it occurred to me that I never reflected on the incident with that top engineer. So I recently did, and he seemed to remember it well too. Then he told me a war story of his own.

When he was younger, in the early 90s, he got to work with some multi-threading code. I wouldn’t know first hand, but he said a lot of the multi-threading support in Windows that we now take for granted were being worked on at the time so he had to work with some super smart engineers that designed them. I actually recognized one name.

In any case, unfamiliar with what he was doing, he ran into trouble. He couldn’t debug the problem on his own and so he called up the engineer whose name I recognized. They hooked up a debugger and the first thing they did was to look at how many threads were active. Once the number popped onto the screen there was dead silence on the phone for a while. And then came the reply.

“JESUS! Hey, come take a look at what this asshole did.”

He says it was hard to take that from an engineer that he deeply respected, but it is something that he still remembers to this day very clearly. I certainly believe him, given his vivid account. And he says the experience has made him a better engineer.

It does’t matter what field you work on. You should count yourself lucky to be able to work with someone who is scary good and can point out where you can improve on. If you find yourself really comfortable, then perhaps you should find ways to challenge yourself unless you want to be stuck on where you are.