Fun, fun! Submit your captions in the comments for this cartoon of “The Veteran.” And don’t forget to provide captions for the other Software Engineers Types too!
The Veteran
He’s been here for five years, and he’ll be here for five more.
Distinguishing Characteristics
- Cranky.
- For some reason, he’s permitted to use profanity in meetings and otherwise behave in ways that would make his mother cringe and your company’s attorneys start job hunting.
- Casual Friday dress is too formal. Facial hair is common.
- You’re never in on his private jokes.
- He’s eaten 5 Product Managers before you, and he will chew through 5 more after you’re gone.
- His manager is afraid of him. He’s eaten through 5 managers before this one, and he’ll chew through … etc.
- Yes, he is always a “he”.
Do you need this engineer?
Yes. He has the best only knowledge of your product’s undocumented, spaghetti code and he knows it, which is why he will never support projects aimed at documenting it. Also, if left ungoverned he can negatively impact the other engineers (except for any offshore team members, which he does not really consider to be part of his team.)
Project Pitfalls:
He can smell fear and ignorance, so don’t defer to him too quickly and don’t ask dumb questions. You’re toast the second you utter your first corporate buzzword in his presence. If he gives you a nickname such as “MBA,” you’re screwed.
Achilles Heel:
He wants to tell his project war stories, like how f-d up the project before this one was, and which “business people” on the project couldn’t handle the stress. He’s happiest when reminiscing about Assembler, or about launch 1.x of the product (which is now in V8.3)
Best Bet:
Bring food. Listen to his stories. Defer to his expertise on architecture, even if you think it’s wrong, because he’s probably right. Do this publicly, so he wins. But the architecture battle is your pawn: don’t compromise on anything user-facing, because if he discovers that can scope-cut one critical user-facing feature, this will set the pattern of your relationship.
Also in 7 Types of Engineers
- Caption Contest! (7 Types of Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Veteran (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Hotshot (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Great One (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Teflon-gineer (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: Offshore (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Maverick (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
- Caption Contest: The Clockwork Mouse (The Seven Types of Software Engineers)
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
To get things rolling…
“I built the backend entirely in SQL using trigges and uncommented stored procedures.”
“You again? You’ll get your friggin’ feature, now get out of my cave. Unless you have donuts.”
“Documentation is for wussies.”
“You look like the last PM. She tripped over the server cable and shut down the site for 3 hours.”
A caption for this one might not fit a mug. He’ll either need a jar or something bigger.
The way he works is by wearing you out with looooong sentences.
Look, we need to build an SDK. Users can write C++ code and make it integrte with anything.
Users come and go, but platforms are forever.
“This is not the way we do things around here”
Um, we tried that 4 years ago and it was a total failure. Got any other bright ideas?
Yeah, well, this is nothing like what it took to roll out the redesign in 2006…
Idiot! If you were able to understand the answer, you wouldn’t ask the question that way.
Your mind will pour out of this cup when I’m done with you….
Did you wear that to Prom…at the time we were building really cool stuff…
There isn’t time for a front-end, we have to rebuild the core to make it rock solid
“If that feature were actually required I’d have coded it, now wouldn’t I?”
“My code is self-documenting”
We are going with an Extreme Programming process, starting Monday. 1-week iterations.
“Oh, so NOW you want my input, eh?”
Or
“Trust me, doing it your way is doomed to failure”
Or
Been there, done that! FAIL!
“Why do the cleaning people keep dropping coins into my mug?”
or
“That’s not a requirement – it’s stupid. Why are our customers such idiots?” <– actual fun quote, though should be read with a German accent
“Oh, I didn’t mean the X data feed, I meant the X data feed. They have the same name? Yeah. But they’re different feeds. We replaced X data feed two years ago, but it still runs. You need the other X data feed. You better get on that if you want it to work in this release.”