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What we can really learn (or remind ourselves) is that code “quality” is rarely representative of company value.
by thinkingkong 5y ago
What we can really learn (or remind ourselves) is that code “quality” is rarely representative of company value.
- Sebb767 5y agoPeople pay you for your product, not what's running under the hood. As long as you can sustain feature development and/or enough pull, code quality is absolutely irrelevant. Also, any large codebase will develop some wharts due to circumstances you can't see when simply reading the code.
- bserge 5y agoHuh, maybe the thinking that everything has to be perfect is rooted in products where people do pay for what's under the hood? I.e. literally cars.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoCars are just a ruthlessly optimized collection of parts that, individually, few people understand. Not unlike software. Unless you're a specialist, you wouldn't know "bad insides" of a car from "good insides" if you took a look under your car's hood. The way I see it, programmer perfectionism comes from learning - the projects you do for yourself, early on, are small enough that you can hit perfect trade-offs on your limited needs, and you aren't under time pressure. You quickly learn you can achieve near-perfection - a lesson which stops applying when working with any nontrivial codebase at work.
- burnt_toast 5y agoThere's plenty of cars out there that mechanics think are designed like junk yet drivers (users) still buy / use them. (Not sure where I was going with this)
- bserge 5y agoEven then, buyers care about performance.
- Sebb767 5y agoI'd say most buyers care about looks and comfort, with reliability and features next. Of those buyers who care about performance, most just want _some_ performance (i.e. having a bit of spice). If you're getting in the real performance space, things like solid corner handling and engine behavior when going all-out, you'll have lost most people. You can add a lot of spice by propping up the care with some nicely tuned turbo, pedal behavior and cooling that is sufficient for just a few accelerations. Most people will never find out the difference.
- ferdowsi 5y ago"Customers aren't paying you for beautiful code" was how this was phrased to me to a manager. If the Twitch codebase hadn't leaked, how many people would have known that their naughty-word-blocker was implemented in a less than perfect fashion?
- dijit 5y agoI hate that you’re being downvoted for this point. This snippet is not the biggest problem with the twitch leak, I spooled through the terraform and a lot of it is awful. But it obviously works for them. I had a overwhelming realisation that code quality really doesn’t matter, I spend a lot of time making my code clean and easy to understand- and that might improve _my_ ergonomics. But realistically my company is not bigger than twitch and if they can operate without major problems with this code then obviously it doesn’t matter.
- thinkingkong 5y agoIt matters to a degree. Most technologists just think that correlation is causation. If the code is good then they must be making piles of cash.