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I would be fascinated to see your evidence that in-house code is any better on average than open-source code. I haven't done a lot of consulting lately, so I h

I would be fascinated to see your evidence that in-house code is any better on average than open-source code. I haven't done a lot of consulting lately, so I haven't seen much in-house code in the last few years. But my experience is that the average in-house codebase is worse. And that makes sense from the incentives. Open-source projects that want more than one contributor need to be approachable enough that people join in. Whereas with most in-house code, people commit to working on it without ever seeing it. Switching to work on another open-source project is easy; switching to another job is hard. Open-source authors get to decide when to release; in-house code is generally driven by execs. And so on.

creamytaco 5y ago
I worked at engineers-call-the-shots fintech and later SV shops for many years. No, their in-house code is not worse than open-source. In fact one can safely say that top companies that attract top talent also have methodologies in place that lead to better than average code quality.
- the_af 5y ago
  If you are comparing the top engineering shops to open source, you should also pick the top (quality) open source projects. Apples to apples. Most in-house code is crap.
pixl97 5y ago
As someone that has to support a lot of in-house code, yea, it's a bunch of crap too. "Works good enough" is how our world generally operates unless under strict regulatory guidelines.