Liar, liar pants on fire – 5 lies that programmers tell themselves

We all lie to ourselves every now and again in both our professional and personal lives, some people may be more likely to do it than others though. Software developers work alone most of the time, for long hours under very strict deadlines, this can lead them to be a little delusional. There are 5 common white lies that developers will tell themselves:

“This code doesn't need commenting”
Developers say that commenting code is a huge drag, what is commenting code? Well, its comments or comment code that helps the developer and user figure out what is what within the tangle of codes. Developers will often find excuses to not do it, or put it off until later, they’ll say things like “I don't need to comment this; I'll know what's going on. I wrote it.” Or “No one could possibly fail to understand my simple user interface.” Sometimes the reasons may be valid, but other times not so much.

“This shouldn't take long”
It could be over-confidence, self-delusion of the desperate need to go home and just relax, but developers will often underestimate the time it’ll take to get something done. You’ll hear them say things like “I can do this easy. It should take like what? 2 hours max?” and “This will be so easy to figure out." The smallest or simplest changes will most likely turn into something bigger and complicated that takes longer than expected.

“I can do it better myself”
Because of open source code being freely available to everyone, there are many codes, tools and applications to make use of, but developers are extremely confident in their own abilities, they’ll often prefer to do it their own way. Have you ever heard a developer say “My code is better than your code.” Or maybe “My way of doing things is better…"

“I’ll fix this later”
Developers are often faced with the horror of procrastination, they can either do something fast or they can do something right. Some will say “I know this is dirty code, I will rewrite it later” and “We'll fix this in a later release.” The main issue is that they intent to save time and cleanup or fix the code later, but they know in their minds that later will never, ever come.

“I know what I’m doing”
Often developers are convinced that they know exactly what they’re doing, and believe it or not that sometimes isn't the case! The overconfidence that most developers have can lead them to cut corners, make silly mistakes or generally not to be careful, you’ll hear them saying things like “I know exactly what the client wants” and “I totally understand that legacy code” all of these things can lead to trouble in the end.

Software developers are like everyone else, they aren't always honest with themselves, whether its procrastination or overconfidence that leads them to tell these little white lies, who knows.

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Written By: Christine Romans
Copy Writer at The Computer Guyz Cape Town