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Two reasons, one technical, one social. Firstly, the original developer probably spent more hours thinking over and working on that bit of code than you have --

by pm215 5y ago

Two reasons, one technical, one social. Firstly, the original developer probably spent more hours thinking over and working on that bit of code than you have -- so maybe they had a good reason for doing it the way they did. You won't know unless you ask them. Secondly, I think it's a fairly natural and common human behaviour that when you spend a lot of time working on or making something that you feel some degree of satisfaction, pride and investment in the result. Even in a cooperative joint endeavour that is striving to avoid an idea of individual "ownership" of parts of the project, I think it can be helpful sometimes to acknowledge that feeling of investment by consulting the original author before walking in and radically changing something they did.

photochemsyn 5y ago
I've heard this many times... 'take ownership of your code' ... but the problem is the vast majority of devs work for corporations who own the code, and unless you're a shareholder that code certainly isn't yours, it's corporate property, that's the deal in most employment scenarios. Realistically, people doing such work care very little about writing 'great code' because they know they have no real 'ownership'. There hopes for higher pay and recognition rely on climbing the corporate ladder by whatever means available. Team member, team leader, division manager, VP of whatever, etc. Blame bad results on someone else, that's the normal tactic for these types. Don't hold up production over code quality concerns, because delays in pushing product to market upset the shareholder board, which they see as lost profits. The whole notion of a 'skilled technical individual who takes pride in their work because they own it' sounds like some awful corporate in-house propaganda campaign to be honest. And this accounts for much of the current mass exodus from the corporate workforce, I imagine.
- pm215 5y ago
  I didn't say "take pride in your code because you own it", I said that because you feel some pride in what you've made you feel some sense of investment in it. And I wasn't trying to speak to legal ownership but to the kind of psychological feeling that might explain people getting a bit cranky if you waltz in and rewrite things. That doesn't happen to everybody or in all situations, but I don't think it's that rare. The code I write is corporately owned in the legal sense but I still feel some attachment to it and care about good workmanship.

by pm215 5y ago

photochemsyn 5y ago

I've heard this many times... 'take ownership of your code' ... but the problem is the vast majority of devs work for corporations who own the code, and unless you're a shareholder that code certainly isn't yours, it's corporate property, that's the deal in most employment scenarios. Realistically, people doing such work care very little about writing 'great code' because they know they have no real 'ownership'. There hopes for higher pay and recognition rely on climbing the corporate ladder by whatever means available. Team member, team leader, division manager, VP of whatever, etc. Blame bad results on someone else, that's the normal tactic for these types. Don't hold up production over code quality concerns, because delays in pushing product to market upset the shareholder board, which they see as lost profits. The whole notion of a 'skilled technical individual who takes pride in their work because they own it' sounds like some awful corporate in-house propaganda campaign to be honest. And this accounts for much of the current mass exodus from the corporate workforce, I imagine.

pm215 5y ago
I didn't say "take pride in your code because you own it", I said that because you feel some pride in what you've made you feel some sense of investment in it. And I wasn't trying to speak to legal ownership but to the kind of psychological feeling that might explain people getting a bit cranky if you waltz in and rewrite things. That doesn't happen to everybody or in all situations, but I don't think it's that rare. The code I write is corporately owned in the legal sense but I still feel some attachment to it and care about good workmanship.