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Sure, but if a senior engineer had written it in the first place, it wouldn't have had to be rewritten, thus saving lots of time (assuming senior engineer is st

Sure, but if a senior engineer had written it in the first place, it wouldn't have had to be rewritten, thus saving lots of time (assuming senior engineer is strong technically :)) If you had instead hired an additional senior guy who was paid 1.5x compared to the junior guy, it would have been a better outcome for the business all around. Of course just using this contrived example, and the exact salary numbers change the outcome...

com2kid 6y ago
We had plenty of senior engineers, they were busy doing senior engineering things! Sometimes not knowing something is supposed to be hard is what makes that hard thing possible to do.
hnedeotes 6y ago
I value code well written, maintainable, and testable but sometimes I'm a bit put off on certain conclusions. Once I read a report by a guy who had come in into a business to re-work an, by his words, unmaintainable mess. This had been written over five years by a single guy and no-one seemed to be able to make sense of it. The one re-writing touted what they had accomplish, a full re-write with a team of 15 or so people, in a couple months. I can believe that some guys are dickheads and do crap and are anti-social or don't want anyone touching their stuff and think they're the last cookie in the packet. On the other hand, there's a real difference between writing from scratch something, with features tacked on week-in week-out, contradicting requests, no time to work through issues or problems, being the only one allocated to the problem and having no real plan or feature map laid out, during 5 years and then coming in, when all the system is laid out, all the bugs and domain knowledge have been made visible, there's a working system that can be used as base to understand the objectives, the rough edges, problems and pain points are also known, and rewriting it from scratch better. Lastly, it's also not known if they had been the ones writing from start with the same constraints if it would have been so pristine as they claim, and it hasn't stood the time for 5 years yet. Maybe it'll end problematic as well but now it took a team of 15 or so that probably cost more than that single guy for 5 years - and still made something that helped keep the business throughout.

com2kid 6y ago

We had plenty of senior engineers, they were busy doing senior engineering things! Sometimes not knowing something is supposed to be hard is what makes that hard thing possible to do.

hnedeotes 6y ago

I value code well written, maintainable, and testable but sometimes I'm a bit put off on certain conclusions. Once I read a report by a guy who had come in into a business to re-work an, by his words, unmaintainable mess. This had been written over five years by a single guy and no-one seemed to be able to make sense of it. The one re-writing touted what they had accomplish, a full re-write with a team of 15 or so people, in a couple months. I can believe that some guys are dickheads and do crap and are anti-social or don't want anyone touching their stuff and think they're the last cookie in the packet. On the other hand, there's a real difference between writing from scratch something, with features tacked on week-in week-out, contradicting requests, no time to work through issues or problems, being the only one allocated to the problem and having no real plan or feature map laid out, during 5 years and then coming in, when all the system is laid out, all the bugs and domain knowledge have been made visible, there's a working system that can be used as base to understand the objectives, the rough edges, problems and pain points are also known, and rewriting it from scratch better. Lastly, it's also not known if they had been the ones writing from start with the same constraints if it would have been so pristine as they claim, and it hasn't stood the time for 5 years yet. Maybe it'll end problematic as well but now it took a team of 15 or so that probably cost more than that single guy for 5 years - and still made something that helped keep the business throughout.