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You need a truth table. Good code + Good Business = Success. Bad code + Bad Business = Failure. Good code + Bad Business = Failure. Bad Code + Good Business
by ep103 3y ago
You need a truth table.
Good code + Good Business = Success.
Bad code + Bad Business = Failure.
Good code + Bad Business = Failure.
Bad Code + Good Business = Success.
Successful businesses can paper over bad code with money, because ultimately bad code just costs the business money.
A better way of thinking about this, I think, is that code quality expresses itself first and foremost in the product's long-term quality. And code quality, like all product quality, costs money.
But not all companies need good quality. Each business niche has a different quality level : product cost niche. A business will do best if the engineering quality matches the business needs, and vice versa.
A company that has spent money writing beautiful code that costs more to support than that business can generate, is in just as bad a place as a business that is growing massively and burning cash papering over a low-quality engineering department with all their new sales contract money.
- esafak 3y agoYour table says code does not matter, but it does for consumer software. That's why Friendster failed and Google succeeded. Figma was made possible by WebAssembly. A lot of businesses had no "business" at the beginning; just a good product (and the code is part of that).
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago> That's why Friendster failed and Google succeeded. More to the point of the Friendster example, that's why Facebook succeeded. Sure, their code was crappy but the site stayed up.
- marcosdumay 3y agoA quantitative way to say that is that rightsizing¹ your quality for your requirements maximizes the chances of success. But code quality is much more flexible than business quality, so that large changes on code still have a smaller impact on success. What absolutely doesn't mean that code is irrelevant; it just means that marketing in incredibly important. 1 - What is a different word from "maximizing" for a reason.
- discreteevent 3y agoBad code can lose customers and eventually fail the business. I've seen it. The code was for paying customers and once the system was buggy enough, they left. All driven by clueless agressive management who read too many blogs about MVP etc.
- ilyt 3y agoGood code is basically investment in future velocity of the project. And vice versa. But while "take a loan to get first version out of the door" is widely understood to be generally good decision, "invest into code so it can pay dividends later" appears to be some dark incantation nobody seems to understand...
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> Bad Code + Good Business = Success. > Successful businesses can paper over bad code with money, because ultimately bad code just costs the business money. Papering over bad code with money is in my opinion by definition bad business.