Top 5 Ways to Make a Developer Your Enemy

Developers are known to be some of the most finicky employees you will encounter in the workplace. However, this is a list of things that will annoy or infuriate developers and non-developers alike.

1. Have the IT Manager send an email to all staff saying that all computers will have a keylogger installed. – This one is wrong on so many levels, the least of which is that it shows how little faith the company has in its employees and breeds mistrust of authority.
2. As a Manager or Team Lead, take ideas and suggestions from meetings with your team, and pass them off to upper management as your own. – This just reeks of someone that is only in it to gain more and more power.
3. As a Manager, don’t take the heat when things go wrong and blame the lowest-level employee instead. – I’ve seen senior management that is supposed to keep track of projects, ignore the project, and when it is the due date, blame those doing actual work on the project, throwing them under the bus.
4. As a new employee, on your second day of work, tell anyone that will listen or is within earshot that you are able to rewrite the entire codebase in three short months. Bear in mind, this codebase is over 7 years old and has a team of more than 20 developers working on it, but of course the newbie can rewrite the entire thing in no time flat.
5. As Management, when a developer hands in his/her resignation, schedule a meeting to try to first place a guilt trip on said employee to convince them to stay. If that doesn’t seem to work, then threaten to give the employee negative referrals if they don’t rescind the resignation and continue working for the company. Keep in mind that this occurred in a right to work state, meaning that there is no agreement in place that the employer would not wait a day or week or month and fire the employee without cause, just out of spite for wanting to work elsewhere.

These are just some of the things that will anger a software developer, so, be aware to avoid these if it matters at all to you.