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Absolutely but this isn’t the situation I’m talking about here. To reuse your analogy, I’m talking about a restaurant who has a mess of an installation, severa
by ornornor 4y ago
Absolutely but this isn’t the situation I’m talking about here.
To reuse your analogy, I’m talking about a restaurant who has a mess of an installation, several panels and breakers, not all up to code, and the electricity frequently shuts off taking hours to figure what happened and how to restore it. It’s also a mild fire hazard and there have been a few close calls that could have burned the place down.
The son in law, a hobbyist electrician, did the installation and extended it for free while the business was starting up and growing. He didn’t do it right but it works and got the restaurant so far.
Now the restaurant is very popular but the constant blackouts are driving people away and hurting profits. The mild fire hazard and not following code irks the authorities and insurance companies and they’re threatening closure. It needs an extra stove to keep up with customer demand but no one can figure out how to hook one up to the existing rats nest, let alone do it safely.
The owner knows this is a problem and is looking for a proper electrician to fix the mess.
In real life, I’d expect the business owner to agree with the electrician on a plan so that either the retaurant stays open (maybe at a lower capacity) so that the tidying up can happen gradually, or close down for renovations for a while so the whole thing can be overhauled quicker.
But what happens in our industry and in my experience is that instead the restuarant owner asks the electrician to tighten a screw or two here and there so that this power socket isn’t as wobbly anymore but then demands even more additions to the janky system and demands they be done as fast and cheap as possible as this is now the top and only priority.
Nothing really improves but the owner (at least for a while) can hide it from the authorities and insurance company because he has a quote and a specialist working on the system. Then the owner can blame the electrician because “he wasn’t able to balance fixing up the installation while extending it, so we’ll fire him and look for someone actually good this time”. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
- emodendroket 4y agoWell, to put it another way, "clean code" can be the means of achieving an end, but if you tell them you're replacing existing code with clean code that sounds like a waste of time. You should be able to describe some concrete goal you are working towards and they should leave it to you to worry about how you do it.