Hacker News Reader

Truth.

Years ago a wise man told me "The compiler is not your customer. The next person who maintains this code is your customer. It might be you."

View on HN

The customer is the one using your product, not the one maintaining your code.

A common reply, but misguided. A corporate coder who is not also CMO and CEO does not produce products for the end user. They produce code units which, after build, deploy, and integration, become useful building blocks in an overall solution which may (the company hopes) be a product for the end user. From this standpoint, the code they write will often be 'consumed' by other coders and by future themselves. The consumers are therefore coders.

Sure, but usually you develop an interface to your service/code, and they shouldn't have to know the internals.

If they have to look at your code to figure out how to use it, you've already lost. Hence the code isn't the product, it's the means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com