this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Infinite Loop (programming.dev)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

To me, a corporation cannot maintain quality code because requirements are ill defined, and there is no “done” state. With those two conditions present, unable to be changed, it’s not possible to form a coherent codebase. Those who try will make things worse, because their abstractions won’t fit in a year or two.

This is exactly the “messy code” people then leave behind. Bad code can come about for other reasons too, of course, but this is one of the more annoying reasons, because someone wrote it with self-righteousness, as if they were the only people to truly SEE the problem. Sigh.

It’s fine, this is how enterprise works. You can learn to navigate and make a living from it. You MUST internalize and accept that it is NOT the same as maintaining code for an open source library or whatever people think it’s going to be.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

because someone wrote it with self-righteousness

Usually a call sign of someone who hasn’t been really entrenched with bad code to understand their foolishness in comparison.

I’ve only seen people hold that idea if :

  1. New and amateurish, I give them a chance cuz they might learn. But let them learn.
  2. Someone who’s only ever worked in maybe two places for very long lengths of time, given way too much power too early, people threw around ‘genius’ too eagerly and these people guard their code like a watch dog likely because it’s so fragile a simple ‘()’ in a string will bust everything . No one else can work on it and the only way you can fix it is the moment they leave. They will not learn. You can only hope the eye of Sauron will stop looking in your direction.