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What the author is really railing against is thoughtless critiques. Declaring software garbage is a usually useless contribution because it only identifies that

What the author is really railing against is thoughtless critiques. Declaring software garbage is a usually useless contribution because it only identifies that software can be improved, which is almost always true. However, it fails to provide any concrete advise for improvement that could be debated. There's the saying "it's not science if people can't disagree with you." Seeing how engineering involves the application of science, it's not engineering either. Therefore, these kinds of comments have no place in a professional community. Being fast to critique _is_ good, provided the critiques are thoughtful. A thoughtful critique takes a clear stance, meaning it can be debated and (in an engineering or scientific setting) experimentally measured to verify it produces the intended effects. A thoughtful critique also poses questions not answered by the original body of work. In the example described here, fixing the software would have been ideal. However, we can imagine scenarios where this isn't possible (e.g. you have a binary from a now-defunct entity that you must continue using.) The original story should have explained this. If it didn't, the critique "fix the garbage software" isn't unreasonable, albeit badly phrased (instead, "why didn't they fix the software?")

shoes_for_thee 6y ago
I think what the author is railing against is the tendency to criticize something before becoming deeply familiar with the problem There's a tendency I've observed nearly everywhere I've worked where a developer wants to totally rewrite some piece of software because "it is garbage." In actuality, his motivations tend to be a combination of "other peoples' code is hard to read and this is not how I would have done it" and not having the depth of familiarity with a problem that you attain doing implementation work. In any cases, asking why something is a particular way is a good thing to do.

shoes_for_thee 6y ago

I think what the author is railing against is the tendency to criticize something before becoming deeply familiar with the problem There's a tendency I've observed nearly everywhere I've worked where a developer wants to totally rewrite some piece of software because "it is garbage." In actuality, his motivations tend to be a combination of "other peoples' code is hard to read and this is not how I would have done it" and not having the depth of familiarity with a problem that you attain doing implementation work. In any cases, asking why something is a particular way is a good thing to do.