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After working in the industry it is easy to realize that "code providing a lot of value to a lot of people" does not at all mean "good code". When I was 15 I h

After working in the industry it is easy to realize that "code providing a lot of value to a lot of people" does not at all mean "good code". When I was 15 I had a website with 80,000 members, yet my code was shit and any company would be simply reckless to hire me. I had a friend that worked on World of Warcraft private servers code when he was also a teen, it was used by millions back then, and yet he told me he was doing little more than copy-pasting code from somewhere else until it worked. For small teams and solo developers, compared to having business value, the importance of having good code is not even secondary, it's barely a concern at all. For a big company like Google, priorities are slightly different because they have the scale and the team that allows it.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
I would be willing to bet that a lot of the code produced at large companies is not very good either, honestly. Almost every company I've ever been at, code quality is a far down the list concerns for the business and that winds up infecting the dev team as well who is constantly scrambling to hit deadlines and produce business value. Some of these companies have been in business making money on these shoddy codebases for decades.
- atomicnumber3 4y ago
  Yeah, I can second this. I worked at a big company popular on this board and while all the devs there were obviously absurdly talented, the general level of code quality was... not good. And it's specifically because management prioritized shipping features over literally anything else, so any time you spent on designing or refactoring was a negative mark on your perf sheet (since that's then a gap where you weren't shipping anything). Maybe the secret sauce is that if you hire good devs and make them write bad code, the code is still workable and is just a huge PITA to figure dev work instead of being totally intractable?
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    I think this is basically exactly it. Everyone needs to hire the best, 10x, rockstar ninja programmers that they can find. They find the people who, given time, could build absolutely amazing high quality systems. They have to try and find those people because they can still produce working, somewhat maintainable systems in less time. And all companies just want to give less time to build things.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  At some point clean code doesn't really exist. I mean, after eliminate this two big cases; a too big function and too deep(inheritance)/wide(composition) indirection. Is pipe only function clean? I don't know, I think it's sometimes.

bluefirebrand 4y ago

I would be willing to bet that a lot of the code produced at large companies is not very good either, honestly. Almost every company I've ever been at, code quality is a far down the list concerns for the business and that winds up infecting the dev team as well who is constantly scrambling to hit deadlines and produce business value. Some of these companies have been in business making money on these shoddy codebases for decades.

atomicnumber3 4y ago
Yeah, I can second this. I worked at a big company popular on this board and while all the devs there were obviously absurdly talented, the general level of code quality was... not good. And it's specifically because management prioritized shipping features over literally anything else, so any time you spent on designing or refactoring was a negative mark on your perf sheet (since that's then a gap where you weren't shipping anything). Maybe the secret sauce is that if you hire good devs and make them write bad code, the code is still workable and is just a huge PITA to figure dev work instead of being totally intractable?
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I think this is basically exactly it. Everyone needs to hire the best, 10x, rockstar ninja programmers that they can find. They find the people who, given time, could build absolutely amazing high quality systems. They have to try and find those people because they can still produce working, somewhat maintainable systems in less time. And all companies just want to give less time to build things.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
At some point clean code doesn't really exist. I mean, after eliminate this two big cases; a too big function and too deep(inheritance)/wide(composition) indirection. Is pipe only function clean? I don't know, I think it's sometimes.