Working a similar number of years in various corporate jobs, I haven't seen too much of that, but it does happen. I'm probably my harshest critic when I'm looki

Working a similar number of years in various corporate jobs, I haven't seen too much of that, but it does happen. I'm probably my harshest critic when I'm looking at code I wrote years ago. Or maybe someone is cursing me after I've moved on. I wonder, you've never been critiqued, but how many times have you gotten a project and had to unravel badly written code? I think the macro-style issues people debate are mostly about code that is being maintained and reworked over and over again in a product with a long life. > I'd go nuts if someone told me I had to use more classes, or a certain language, or tabs over spaces, or whatever. Those issues all have root causes you must have dealt with. Tabs vs. spaces type stuff is mostly about keeping diffs clean in a repo. Language choice is just a matter of components being able to work together, and being able to hire people who can work on it. And choices like "more classes" are usually revolving around testability of code. > I don't know how you guys put up with it Absolutely, maintaining a product over a long period of time can be exhausting. I think there are benefits to it, though. It's extremely gratifying when you've written something that someone else builds on and they actually get the structure and their new code fits in very closely to how you intended. The whole thing kind of becomes your baby, albeit a baby that you're thinking, "one of these days I'm going to cut her head off and stitch a new one on and she'll be way cuter."