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Comment by dvcc | Hacker News Reader

I am going to preface this with the a small piece of information, I work in corporate America.

From my perspective, I don't quite get a lot of the points. No unit-tests? Most code bases don't have them. Cucumber tests? You're already ten giant leaps ahead of most products out there.

Code in disarray? Used to it for every single project I have to come into. Factories/viewers at least there is some semblance of structure!

False corporate goals? It's a company, I expect nothing else from them.

Weird North Korea chants? That's just weird as hell.

Again, I don't work in SF or NY so it's hard to know what exists within startup culture, but to me all of this just sounds like the norm. There is much less importance placed on decent code then there is on just getting something out.

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Fellow enterprise developer here.

Startup culture freaks me the fuck out. I just want to write clean code, then go home and do something other than writing code. I'm not at all interested in giving my life to a project.

Totally agreed. When I left college I was convinced I'd never work for a startup because of the terrible stereotypes about startup culture. I love programming, but there is nothing I love so much that I want to do it all day every day and never do anything else. Even if you're a founder and would actually make a life-changing amount of money if the company was acquired, I really believe it's counterproductive never to take breaks. That's how you end up with code you take one look at and rewrite the next morning.

Ironically I work for a startup now, but one with a shockingly sane approach to working hours. I specifically asked about that in the interview and it turns out they were telling the truth, they really do care about work life balance.

At one time, I thought Medium carried articles of importance and repute. I no longer think that about most of them.

Medium is just a place where anyone can throw anything up there and have a potential of get linked to.

Every popular website will go through Eternal September at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The challenge is how to enforce quality despite the surge in users.

A required lurking period, maybe?

Unlikely to work. Required lurking means lack of participation and thus lack of learning.

My counter suggestion is to encode the culture you desire in to the function of the site.

I had never heard of that but did notice the effect.

Medium was originally invite only, so the earliest articles on the site did indeed have a certain amount of importance and quality to them.

Unfortunately, since it opened up to the public, it's turned into something akin to a cross between an inspiring cliches platform, a marketing tool and a place for people to complain about things on social media sites.

Yes, but this is a company that claims to care about software quality.

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