I just answered this questions: "What screams 'I am a coward software developer'?" - What would you have said?

https://quora.com/What-screams-I-am...

I agree with the comment that this question encourages brogrammer culture. But some of the answers were interesting.

For me: "Being afraid to change code because my manager wrote that code." I find myself in this situation now. I have not yet found a way to constructively criticize the code without saying "its shit". Even though a colleague of mine also agrees that a lot of the code is badly architectured (read as: global crap everywhere, no design approach). It badly needs a major refactor.

@Demolishun Well... If you were to show me some of the downsides of something - and then show me some cool design patterns that save time and money and sanity... I'd be super grateful! and.. you never know. They might even come back with some stuff you didn't think of. We're all learning all the time, right? : )

I think there's a difference between an inexperienced and a cowardly dev. Here an example of someone who was both at the same time:

We had an external team do an update. The dev encountered a very strange bug that had actually been in there all along, but with his compiler version, it finally bit.

He was unable to find and fix the bug, that was inexperience. The cowardice was that he didn't tell me and didn't call for help.

Instead, made an awful workaround that would not fix the root cause, but just happened to work by chance, and that shit was scattered throughout the codebase.

Of course, I saw that when diffing his changes and immediately flagged this out as inacceptable. Only THEN, he came forward with the problem and asked for support.

@Demolishun I would approach take bosses with a "that used to be a viable practice, but since it has been an accepted better practice to do it this way: [...]"

And then preferably give a few references to high profile/trustworthy sources explaining why it's better practice — and stay away from saying it's "best practice" yourself ;)