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I guess it depends on the environment. In a startup, you need results and vision. Even if it costs millions to clean up the mess, you need to get version one ou
by wisty 16y ago
I guess it depends on the environment. In a startup, you need results and vision. Even if it costs millions to clean up the mess, you need to get version one out the door. Technical debt is still an issue (sloppy code can cause bugs, and make it harder to iterate), but you don't need the code to be as clean as humanly possible.
In a more stable environment, dirty code will almost certainly come back to haunt you, or your successor. It's not worth 1 man-year to clean up 1 man-year of work, just so you could your job done a little faster. Besider, the pointy-haired manager will push you to speed up, even if it causes more problems later.
- 1337p337 16y agoFor a major undertaking, sure. If you're a start-up, odds are that you have one product, and you can't afford for it to stagnate while it's scrapped and rewritten or while the developers layer hacks on hacks to fix bugs created by the last round of hacks. Even a start-up, though, has tons of code that is not part of the main codebase. A pile of monitoring scripts, a program that generates an arbitrarily large amount of data for a test database, the company's blog, internal mailing list software, etc. When you have fewer than 50 employees, it is okay if half of those codebases are ugly hacks.