Amit Chawla DotNet: All and Sundry

Let me get this clear first. Unlike rouge traders, a rouge coder is not driven by fear and greed. It is not about allure of boodle. Nobody wants to be a rouge coder. You do not become one suddenly. They either happen to be one, or become one over a period of time. Mostly, they are unaware of their relative rouge-ness.

Here are a few traits that set these people apart:

When asked to analyse, they write code. When asked to design, they write code. When asked to code, they write code. This personality type just jumps head-first in a sincere effort to solve problems. Wether the problems are actually solved, is a completely different story.

As a result of that extreme and instant desire to ‘help out’, these pros end up using the most complex solution imaginable. There are reasons:

• They spend little time on understanding requirements
• Ask questions? Not the ones that matter
• All their tasks are generally 85% complete
• Have just finished fixing ‘the last bug’
• Procrastination is an integral part of their personality. If the software development world was ‘The Ecosystem’, then the rouge coder would be its ‘Koala’ equivalent. For example, they do not modify the code they borrow from other people. Copy database queries from documents/samples straight into stored procedures… ‘Fix’ bugs while doing little or no impact analysis…
• Always have hypothesis on the technology, problem, solution, design-element or a business rule. For example, many years ago I was informed by someone (Verbatim):

In .Net, the global assembly cache is an architecture responsible for compiling assemblies at run time. It is not part of the computer’s file system, but is something that exists solely in memory. It also solves the problem of JIT.

I stopped short of adding:

GAC also solves the larger world problems, such as: population explosion, poverty, and global warming.

Rouge Coders come in handy during the build phase of developing a minefield system.

Do you know one?

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