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“We mob every thing so that means we don’t need pull requests, because by the time the code is committed it’s had plenty of pairs of eyes on it”

Well, I beg to differ.
Today I read through some of this spaghetti mobbed code to look into a performance issue. Wasn’t supposed to but bored stiff so I ‘went dark’ and did it without the mob.

After about an hour I figured out it runs a few lines of dubious code and if there’s an error it tries many times over with an exponential back off.
And each run of the methods will fail for sure because of how it’s written.
Someone must’ve seen this problem but instead of realising it can never work, they’ve wrapped it in retries and back offs.

So many back offs and retries that it just sits there doing this for 25 minutes.

But yeah. The mobbing works great guys, keep churning out this quality code. 😂😂😂
Can’t wait to see the back of this joke job.

Comments
  • 7
    Oh yeah I should add that the fix was just deleting the whole thing because it did nothing anyway
  • 6
    You rat! How dare you go find and eat the bugs we cultivate
  • 2
    Problem is that during the mob session you are in a certain mindset. Focused on churning out your thoughts while the rest compliments the same vision to output working code (well in your case not even that). That is a different mindset from reviewing.
    Not saying that it can't happen with mob programming, lots of approaches and quantity issues can be raised and fixed but it is easy to miss them and the bigger picture when you are attacking the code with an angry mob.
  • 0
    I had never heard of mob coding, only pair programming. Definitely not something that would appeal to me
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