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Comment by mspcommentary | Hacker News Reader

About 10 years ago I joined a new company, and I looked at their code and thought "what idiots wrote this?", which was strange, because everyone there was very bright. A little while later, some more new devs joined, looked at the code, and thought "what idiots wrote this?", and I was a bit annoyed, because some of that code was mine. They did a big rewrite. A little while after that, some more devs joined, looked at the rewrite and thought "what idiots wrote this?".

Fundamentally, no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions. They always think that they'd have done it better if they'd had the chance.

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I see this attitude a lot and I now kind of categorize it within "contempt culture", which I think mostly just falls out of insecurity. I've been guilty of this myself and I try pretty hard to not do it now, but life is a journey and all that.

I do two things to dig out of this particular hole:

- Have some (relatively) objective standards by which I judge code/a project

- Have some empathy for people who were probably just doing their best, in the most multivariate sense ("I wrote this in Clojure so I didn't burn out", "I had to ship this in three days and I was just back from paternity leave", "I was onboarding a junior engineer and dumped this spaghetti in a spare 3 hours to mollify an important client"

#2 is very useful because it snaps me out of contempt and helps prevent me from spreading that culture to the engineers around me. But #1 is actionable in that when I do get time to "do things right" I have some values to aim at. Mostly they're:

- Does this code build/respect a coherent mental model of the problem space

- Is it possible to represent invalid state

- Are surprises/pitfalls noted (I'm not a big commenter in general, but this is a case where I find them useful)

- Does this code consider likely engineer workflows (e.g. is it easy to add another case to handle, is it easy to enable debugging, etc.)

Notably none of these are like, "methods are too long" or "variable names are too short" or whatever. I find orthodoxies like these just serve to create in/out groups and have no impact on code quality. Or, another way to say this is that if you're building a coherent mental model, your methods are probably the right size.

> Fundamentally, no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions.

I dislike this generalization, as it doesn't go down to the gist: Solutions that adhere to "some" well-known patterns or ways to build things are more likely to be accepted by other fellow developers.

I, personally, can happily work with other people's code or solutions. :)

It gets worse as time goes on to. Old code and teenage fashion choices have a lot in common.

> no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions

I think there's a frequent cause to this... It's difficult to know the requirements and constraints in place when that code or solution came to be. Many of us would have done something very similar, at least in spirit, under the same conditions. But those conditions constantly change and we tend to judge solutions based on current conditions. Try judging your own solutions by current conditions years after developing them and they sometimes won't look as good as you remember then being. When doing that, it's tempting to think "but x wasn't available and we didn't know y." With other people's solutions, we often lack the knowledge to be aware of those justifications. Investigating to find some of those justifications has helped me better figure out when replacing something is the right or wrong thing to do.

I regularly look at code and think "what idiot wrote this?" and then realize that idiot was me.

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