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Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

> You answered your own question :)

So "do not do the hard parts"?

That is very unprofessional

Unprofessional to who, exactly? Like a sister comment says, an understandable system was built, so it seems like a strong professional relationship existed.

Every codebase is going to have different definitions of "professional standards".

There is a limited time available. The root comment was getting success with other means. Adding good documentation would have costed much more time. That might have made their projects less successful in this case.

> Adding good documentation would have costed much more time

That is the problem

Not that it is true, it is not, for many reasons. It is a problem that is believed

costed more = it would take time. you have magic ways in which good documentation can be created without any time at all allocated to the effort?

The cheapest time to add documentation is when you have the information in your head because you just worked on it. Nobody is demanding an essay for every method, but just write down what went through your head when you implemented weird hack #17 or found out that the API you're calling does something surprising.

The main challenge is that you would need to write the documentation for a person who might have never used this particular software before.

The information that is in your head might be nonsense for this person, and there is chance that it is not reducing the time it takes to understand in a meaningful way.

It's a best effort thing - as anything in software.

waste of time too

Achieving desired result is professional. And achieving desired result without doing the hard parts is not only professional, but smart and actually kind of awesome.

> Achieving desired result is professional.

No. It is geeking out, part of the job...

> achieving desired result without doing the hard parts is not only professional, but smart and actually kind of awesome.

That is a menace. I think I am working on code you wrote

It is the opposite of professional. It is amateur, irresponsible dilettantism

"Professional" is doing what they're paying you for, end of story.

Most employers have less than zero interest in paying coders to document in my experience. If they want documentation to exist, they hire a technical writer.

Sadly, I've never met an employed tech writer (and no, journalists don't count).

You're not being paid to document, you're being paid for writing maintainable code (in decent places at least) and it's your job as a professional to decide how much documentation that includes. In my opinion the idea that good code is "self-documenting" is a myth.

> ...to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting

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