Cannot say about my current company, but the last one (a real estate listing agency in South America). It was very important, but there was always a huge debate

Cannot say about my current company, but the last one (a real estate listing agency in South America). It was very important, but there was always a huge debate of what was important to comment. One developer thought that adding docblocks was just enough. The other thought about commenting the why of code blocks etc. So your question may sound like "How important it is to live within your own means". Everyone will agree, at some level, the living within means is important - but people will diverge on whether you just give up your goals or aiming for them anyway. Comments as much as code are meant for human eyes. The main difference are that comments are not executed, therefore they are less likely to be updated when the reason for a piece of code changes as well. Programmers update code until it compiles and passes tests, but it doesn't follow they update comments accordingly. Nothing is more misleading than an outdated comment. Also, you might find those who will say that if the code is self-evident, then it does not need commenting. Which is theoretically true, but usually people miscalculate the ability of later read to extract context of uncommented code.