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This is the broken window fallacy [1]. If the company didn't have to pay developers to maintain bad code, they could invest that money in something more economi
by necubi 16y ago
This is the broken window fallacy [1]. If the company didn't have to pay developers to maintain bad code, they could invest that money in something more economically useful, like new products.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
- towelrod 16y agoUnless they went out of business while trying to perfect the code instead of releasing any kind of product.
- adrianN 16y agoThere is a vast stretch of appropriate solutions between the maintainability hell of "hardcode the coordinates of every pixelchange in your animation" and perfect code.
- billybob 16y agoAbsolutely. Let's not fall into false dichotomies here. Yes, we developers sometimes focus on making the code perfect, beyond the point where there's an actual business case. So we need to be reminded that the code serves the business, not vice versa. But really. Bad enough code is a liability to the business. You can't add features to make the customers happy, you get bugs you don't understand, it runs really slowly, etc. The real trick is determining, with an intelligent conversation between developers and business people, what's good enough.