Nobody Should Be Using Rubber Duck Debugging in 2022
The alternative is 10x
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Even the best software engineers have bad days. Logic can feel impenetrable and difficult to process, yet you need to get that feature out of the door. Yesterday.
What to do?
Choosing the right technique at the right time is vital, as is knowing a variety of tools that you can choose when you just can’t see the way through or around your technical problem.
Rubber Duck Debugging?
This is a technique where you talk through your problem with a rubber duck as if they were a colleague. You don’t waste anyone’s time, you don’t look stupid for being stuck on a trivial problem and best of all you often come up with the solution in short order.
Happy Days!
Duck Out Of Here.
Using rubber duck debugging is in lieu of describing your problems to a co-worker.
You’re not working in a team, and you’re avoiding speaking to people
Instead of pair programming, and learning from one another you are in your silo. Your problem remains your problem, and learning is limited to you. Yeah, a couple colleagues should read your work in a code review but they just skim it before “LGTM”.
What a wasted opportunity.
Ducking The Issue
A problem shared is a problem halved. If you use rubber duck debugging and it is successful you probably didn’t have a big issue in the first place. You knew the answer and just needed to think it over.
If you’re not thinking things over as a software developer, you might just be a ticket pusher. Nothing wrong with ticket pushers but shouldn’t you think about raising your standards and become a vital team player?
Look up, not down
Work as a team, or don’t bother
We need to work together to deliver features. If you’re sick one day (month, year, leave) the organizational knowledge is the most important thing. If you aren’t spreading your knowledge throughout the team, and working to make yourself redundant you won’t get that promotion. You won’t deserve it and frankly those who work to protect their knowledge at the expense of the team deserve to be fired.
There: I said it
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
