Any developer, with any level of experience, has the potential to be dangerous. This is the junior developer having trouble grokking the ripple effect of his or her changes. It could just as easily be the senior engineer rampaging through the codebase with rewrites.
Before diving into this topic, a manager’s perspective must be given. Bad habits are just habits; they do not define a person or their abilities. When your colleague exhibits bad habits, it’s easy to point fingers and use them as a scapegoat. However, this kind of thinking is unfair; with large-scale software development, blame should never be assigned to an individual.
In the rare case where an individual’s presence at an organization becomes a disservice to the business, then that person needs to go. Bad apples aside, we must always remember that responsibility is bubbled up through management. It’s not your fault if your broken code gets through to production. Incidents in production are your team’s fault, your boss’s fault, and ultimately, the company’s fault—so in effect, no one’s fault. At a company, success and failure are never attributable to any single individual; success and failure are attributable to teams. It’s important to remember this.
With that said, here are my top 10 bad habits for software developers.
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