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The lie we tell ourselves is that the quality of code matters to non-engineers. It seems it doesn't. The most uncomfortable truth of our field is that there i
by jmcqk6 6y ago
The lie we tell ourselves is that the quality of code matters to non-engineers. It seems it doesn't.
The most uncomfortable truth of our field is that there is no floor for how bad code can be, yet still make people billions of dollars.
Because that's the outcome everyone else is seeking - making money. They don't care how good the code is. They care about whether it's making money or not.
- commandlinefan 6y agoWell, you're not saying it right. When a non-programmer (and even some programmers) hear "bad code", they start thinking in terms of aesthetics. In fact, "bad code" is sometimes just called "ugly code", making the analogy worse. Fast, responsive code is probably "ugly" to some people, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Maintainable code is so verbose as to be considered "bad" to some on first glance, but proves its worth when the requirements change. Rather than talk about code quality, we should be harping on product quality, which can only be achieved through consistent software (dare I say?) engineering practices - which, if followed consistently and unapologetically, will accidentally lead to "good" code.
- mint2 6y agoHaha the non-engineers at my place don’t care at all about code quality. The non-engineers also decided to write their own internal tool, with no review and zero attention to quality. It’s been outputting wrong results that will cost them a few million at least.
- WorldMaker 6y agoReminds me of the job where we'd have huge slowdowns in our massive SQL Cluster because some non-engineers in "R&D" "had" to run unoptimized, barely legible Access queries against it. We eventually had to create a replica of Production specifically for such nonsense. Well then we moved a lot more business logic that they "helped develop" that ran on a distributed platform closer to "real time" for the application, because it was very dynamic in nature, and couldn't be denormalized back into the DB and remain performant. So I had to build a new system for some of their ad hoc queries and teach them how to use it. What eventually chuffed me was realizing the "R&D" person I was "training" on the system always wore a different three piece suit every day and at least in fashion signals was probably making a magnitude higher salary than me for slower, wronger answers than any system I worked on, but probably was great at throwing it (very slowly) into very fancy graphs in Excel and useless salesmanship. There were a lot of reasons I already wasn't long for that job at that point, but that was a lasting lesson that quality and performance won't matter to certain styles of upper management.
- papito 6y agoI have totally accepted the fact that quality of code does not matter to stakeholders. That actually makes sense. No one got an infusion of VC money because they used Node and the LATEST libraries. They don't care what's under the hood. What bothers me is that robustness and maintainability of code no longer seems to matter to engineers. Believe me, the pressure right now to deliver working code no matter what is much less than, say, in early 2000's, when web development was very new and few people knew what they were doing.
- andrekandre 6y agothis so rings true it hurts just imagine if automobiles, aerospace or construction was run like that.... (hint, it was in the early days)