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Oh absolutely code can be shit. But I’ve also seen code that’s made the company millions of dollars and run flawlessly for 20 years be called “shit” because it

Oh absolutely code can be shit. But I’ve also seen code that’s made the company millions of dollars and run flawlessly for 20 years be called “shit” because it doesn’t look like modern code. The replacement naturally consumes many times more resources and has bugs that were long fixed in the old code. In my experience the latter case is far more common. But I suppose experiences will differ dramatically depending on what you work on.

mgkimsal 7y ago
I'd meant to add that part as well too - code can be bad and still work, and work OK. The problems only come in when it needs to be changed. I've advised a number of folks to care less about the code style, and focus more on making it at least understandable. I don't particularly care if you're using a factory pattern or not, but please do doc/comment someplace what the expected behavior for your 'backordering' logic is. I can fix things later if I understand what was intended, vs just what I have to guess at later. Have worked on some projects in the last few years that are 'bad' from code perspective. One is bad, but the company as a whole operates... decently, and is improving, and more importantly, is providing a lot of value to their customers. The customers tolerate some bugs now and then because a) they still get value and b) the issues are addressed. There's a full process for changes/fixes/rollouts, and the team overall understands that there's tech debt to deal with. Some folks understand that they're still paying off tech debt from 3-4 years ago, and understand those decisions were bad, and try to avoid those same mistakes. Hundreds of integration and unit tests (growing every week) help grow the confidence levels, and remove barriers to smaller refactoring efforts, because there's a reasonable way to detect the impact of changes. It's not perfect, but that's also understood and accepted. Another one is the CI/Laravel situation from above. Small company, no real 'tech' people on staff - it's all 'outsourced'. They're frustrated because they see other companies progressing faster than they do, and everything seems to take 5x longer than they expect. It's because the code is bad (on many levels). If we were not trying to make any changes, and it just ran in its current state, it would still continue to make money for them, but they want new features, which requires actually understanding how everything fits together. It took two people several months to have a reasonable understanding of how all the running parts fit together (while also trying to add new features/etc), and finally get a small number of unit tests in place.

mgkimsal 7y ago

I'd meant to add that part as well too - code can be bad and still work, and work OK. The problems only come in when it needs to be changed. I've advised a number of folks to care less about the code style, and focus more on making it at least understandable. I don't particularly care if you're using a factory pattern or not, but please do doc/comment someplace what the expected behavior for your 'backordering' logic is. I can fix things later if I understand what was intended, vs just what I have to guess at later. Have worked on some projects in the last few years that are 'bad' from code perspective. One is bad, but the company as a whole operates... decently, and is improving, and more importantly, is providing a lot of value to their customers. The customers tolerate some bugs now and then because a) they still get value and b) the issues are addressed. There's a full process for changes/fixes/rollouts, and the team overall understands that there's tech debt to deal with. Some folks understand that they're still paying off tech debt from 3-4 years ago, and understand those decisions were bad, and try to avoid those same mistakes. Hundreds of integration and unit tests (growing every week) help grow the confidence levels, and remove barriers to smaller refactoring efforts, because there's a reasonable way to detect the impact of changes. It's not perfect, but that's also understood and accepted. Another one is the CI/Laravel situation from above. Small company, no real 'tech' people on staff - it's all 'outsourced'. They're frustrated because they see other companies progressing faster than they do, and everything seems to take 5x longer than they expect. It's because the code is bad (on many levels). If we were not trying to make any changes, and it just ran in its current state, it would still continue to make money for them, but they want new features, which requires actually understanding how everything fits together. It took two people several months to have a reasonable understanding of how all the running parts fit together (while also trying to add new features/etc), and finally get a small number of unit tests in place.