I’m hoping that one day more developers realize code quality doesn’t drive business value. Except for a niche market (APIs built for developers), the apparent c

I’m hoping that one day more developers realize code quality doesn’t drive business value. Except for a niche market (APIs built for developers), the apparent code quality matters very little for delivering actual value. The actual value which then becomes the salary of the developers who all seem to claim the business has no idea what they are doing. Code quality is a trade off. Sometimes that trade off can result in a ROI by lowering long term maintenance costs enabling you to deliver new feature more cost effectively. Sometime that trade off means that your startup was too late to the market and a competitor was bought by Microsoft instead. Regardless, the trade off needs to be discussed and the options weighed. I get that programmers want to view themselves as craftsmen making a work of art. I’m sure there are plumbers obsessed about crafting the perfectly soldered joint. I respect both of them for their efforts and passion, but have to acknowledge both misunderstand the role they are being paid for the majority of the time. For all of Jonathan Blow’s wisdom, I find that too often he’s just a curmudgeon yelling at kids to get off his lawn and waxing poetic about how much better it was in his day. He suffers from the same malady that so many people seem to fall into throughout the generations. That the new generation is shit and everything is falling apart has been a consistent theme for the last two thousand years at least. Quite frankly it’s old and boring.