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This summarizes corporate programming in a nutshell and why I think that almost no programming done nowadays can be considered engineering in practice. I’ve bec

• miltondts 5y ago
  If you press them hard enough they'll start spouting stuff like: - "We engineer for maintainability/extensibility/scalability!" Except that unlike with performance, they generally don't have any numbers to back their assertions. I know it is much more difficult to measure, but their confidence would have you believe that what they are saying is a well established fact. When I point this out, the responses turn to "I read it in some book. It looks cleaner!". Very hard to turn those discussions into anything productive due to the lack of metrics.
  • eska 5y ago
    That stings so bad. I’ve had this exact same experience of pressing somebody for proof, some measurement, a paper, some post mortem, anything. And I literally got the response “I read that in some book by some author in some chapter on some page I don’t remember”. I just told the CTO “sorry, but what do you expect me to do with this?”. In some company where we offered a web API I couldn’t get the cto to publish statistics about endpoint usage. I became great friends with one of the ops, who I passed an awk script to run on all the web servers’ access files. Turned out that most of the supposedly critical endpoints with tight deadlines were used almost never. But for some reason people REALLY don’t like measuring. By now I’m in charge of a software team, and I instill into everyone that programming should be engineering work, and emotional judgements are unprofessional and signs of a bad programmer.