Programmer Tim and new things.

David Jetelina
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Once upon a time, in a parallel dimension, there was a developer called Tim. In Tim’s world, databases were relatively new and cool, they were not yet adopted by the majority. Up to this point, his company was using files to store all the data — files like csv, or just individual files for each record using the path to give the data structure.

One day, Tim was told that they needed to set up a database, not for the whole project, but for this one small part. He was the most likely to enjoy exploring something new, so he dove into it. Quite obviously, he liked the idea of databases. When he was done with his assignment, he knew that the idea had potential and he couldn’t wait to tell the rest of the team so they could start using it. To his surprise, nobody in his team was really interested in them. So whenever a database related issue came up, he was the one to deal with it.

After months of being annoying, saying how databases are amazing, there turned out to be another use case for databases and his superior decided that it’d be nice if more things started using databases, so finally the green light lit up. Tim thought :

I can’t wait for others to offer me their point of view once they understand the concept! We can surely improve the way I did things!

So he began mentoring each of team members on databases, everyone had their task assigned and he was there to teach them on that assignment. For some reason though, not everyone wanted to work on it right away and when they did, they didn’t care to learn about the technology, they just wanted to finish it and move on to their familiar territory.

When everything was done, Tim was disappointed, he didn’t get any new insights from his colleagues, nobody even tried to improve on the way he did things. They took his word for granted, did it just the way he suggested they do it and that was that. Months passed and Tim was swamped by different tasks that would last for quite a while while new ticket appeared saying something needs to be done with databases. Everyone avaoided that ticket, they wanted Tim to do it when he will be able to. When Tim asked why won’t they try and to it, they tried to be funny, saying that they are using databases just because they are new and that they seriously don’t see any advantages over csv files.

Being Tim sucks. And it’s not just new technologies. We as developers need a bit of confrontation of our views, we know that our way most likely isn’t the most optimal and that every point of view might bring something useful. So when you as a team do something, don’t let one person be the only person to do it. Don’t depend, challenge his views and move forward — as a team.

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python developer @ heureka.cz, gamer, christian, european

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