Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

I think, sadly, that's often "the job". My career has been good so far, all things considered, but I think it would probably be better if embracing that idea came more naturally to me.

One of my first strange and unpleasant realizations in transitioning from studying computer science to "working in the real world" came in a 1:1 meeting with my manager at my first job out of school. I was complaining about code quality both in the context of some of our existing codebases and some new code one of my peers (also a junior developer) had recently written. When the light bulb finally lit up in my naive little head, the question I asked my manager with a sense of horror and outrage was "... so you're saying they wrote bad code on purpose?". The painful thought was that I, too, would (or had already) found myself tasked with pushing code that I knew sucked, for reasons entirely unrelated to architecture or design or other purely "technical" constraints.

I used to fantasize about moving into a different software niche, maybe in safety critical systems, where correctness is more highly valued. But recently I'm coming to realize that the thing I crave (and miss from my school days) is the joy of the craft— something involving elegance and taste in a way that even the strictest standards of correctness doesn't necessitate.

I think for the most part, truly excellent code isn't something many businesses perceive themselves as needing (even if many practical benefits can flow from its virtues). And, probably, for many businesses, such indifference is right. So excellent code, where it exists, is probably more often "gotten away with", half-snuck in by stubborn engineers who are productive enough to burn time injecting some extra consideration and effort into their code, than it is commissioned by a business which understands that it wants good code.

I think about this a lot. My belief is professional programmers should not be artists.

I think about other professions. A cook cannot spend time making every dish perfect. A bricklayer isn't perfectly aligning every brick. Even in movie-making there's a shooting schedule. Things go wrong and the best filmmakers know how to keep the production moving.

I love the craft of programming, but I see a lot other craft-oriented programmers who want every line to be beautiful. If you want to write code poetry in your off-time, that's your business. But that's not the job.

At work we are bricklayers and cooks. We practice a craft, but also have time constraints. I try to do my best work while working at pace. Sometimes my code could be better, but it's not worth the time to fix. Ultimately the thing we make is the running software, not what's under the hood. The business people are sometimes right

The bricklayer's building that falls over, or the cook that makes food that tastes bad and no one wants to eat and makes people sick isn't going to have a job for very long, however. And of course, the job of "cook" runs the gamut from minimum wage at a shitty diner, to being very well paid at a Michelin star restaurant. So shipping code > beautiful code, but three years from now, that one "quick and dirty hack" just to get the next version out the door has become three hundred hacks, and that tech debt is a liability preventing any movement, either fixing existing bugs or in shipping new features.

So maybe not every line of code needs to be even more beautiful than the last, but there's clearly a balance to be had. And yes, sometimes the business people are right. Sometimes they are wrong, however.

I think we're both arguing for balance here

When I started programming I wanted everything I wrote to be museum-ready. I was slow as shit and waaay too precious about code. As I've matured I realize that's not a good way to work.

I think my lowest acceptable quality bar is still pretty high (and I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is valued). But as time has gone on I've tried to emphasize speed and knowing when something is "good enough"

I feel that it's an important skillset for the profession, but often craft-oriented engineers dismiss it at "business people not understanding"

As always this depends a bit on where you work and your projects

> A cook cannot spend time making every dish perfect.

That's too generalised. A fast food cook can't spend time to make things perfect. A tiny, fancy Japanese place will spend time to manually craft a perfect dish and you'll wait while watching the whole process.

I suspect that you can find something similar in every category you mentioned.

> watching the whole process

I think this is worth exploring. Not shoving the details of work in people's faces to assert its quality, but somehow creating some drama or interest in its quality. In a way compatible with the immediate practical needs.

This isn't an easy problem to solve. And the example of a boutique Japanese restaurant is a good one. In this case, the process is designed to make consuming the food, the immediate practical problem, more satisfying.

Perhaps the code equivalent, would be seeing changes in sequence, where each change is obviously well done from the user's and manager's perspective. A process more easily achieved by green field work. Which is also relevant to the restaurant example, where each dish is its own creation (within a well thought out process).

Your analogies don't work. Nobody pushes a cook or a bricklayer so hard that they cannot have a basic level of quality to their work. A meal that makes a customer sick or an entire floor of a building collapsing due to bad bricklaying is the limit the managers in those areas generally don't cross.

Not the case in commercial programming. If you manage to pull a heroic and still deliver something that does not fall over in a near-impossible deadline and with a lot of pressure then you are actually doing a huge disservice to yourself because the leadership will think "welp, obviously he can do it in those conditions" and next thing you know, next time around it will be even more difficult.

"Give them an inch, they will take a mile". Sadly this proverb very often applies to business people.

Most commercial programmers are extremely squeezed. I started daydreaming for another profession lately but yeah, ain't happening in my 40s with a very unstable financial situation.

I've read your sibling comments. It seems like you were on the other extreme and it does seem to me that now you are overcompensating by being too sympathetic with business and management. Whiplash effects are very understandable while one is still trying to find their balance. Still, don't give those people too much credit.

What do you mean by basic level of quality?

What are you being pressured to do to meet a deadline that's on the level of building collapse?

"skimp on the tests" or "do this hard to maintain fix as the solution" is maybe the hardest I've gotten pushed. Are people telling you to skip auth to hit a deadline?

Here's mine from my most recent consulting engagement:

"We understand and recognize that this feature we asked of you absolutely cannot be done without the database denormalization you warned us is necessary several weeks ago, but we are still unhappy with you that you couldn't make it work without it and so we are ending our cooperation."

Consider yourself privileged.

I do all sorts of root-cause analyses and I don't sit to code until I am reasonably sure I'll make a positive impact. Long gone are the days when I started coding enthusiastically after hearing just two sentences.

It was still not enough.

I'll not start a flame war -- too tired for it -- but let us just say that some stereotypes exist for a reason.

That's fair I appreciate you taking the time to respond, that's a helpful example

> "... so you're saying they wrote bad code on purpose?"

Depends how you define "one purpose". I feel like I could polish any code to perfection forever. But the threshold of bad is going to be very murky. Is it still bad after 5min? After 30? After an hour? After a day?

Wherever you think is the right effort/benefit threshold, it will turn out to be different in a few weeks. And you'll find people who think it's too fancy and people who think it's bad. Rarely is there objectively bad code. (Yeah, sometimes there is)

> Wherever you think is the right effort/benefit threshold, it will turn out to be different in a few weeks.

Very true. And experiencing this has absolutely been a useful lesson to me. I remember feeling pained over some code I wanted to write in a more robust and principled way in front of a big deadline, and after a bit of friendly push and pull with my manager, I agreed to console myself by throwing in some TODOs and FIXMEs in the comments instead of getting carried away overengineering or burning rubber just beautifying my style. I remember this ritual feeling painful at the time, though it helped me cross the finish line sooner. A few months later, it was clear that ~80% of that code would be good enough for the next year or so— by which time other parts of the application would have evolved as well. I even ended up glad I'd deferred a few of those changes just so the small refactors could be informed by things we'd learned in the meantime.

Sometimes it goes the other way, or course! Many times I've been glad for some extra care I put in early, or regretful about some I didn't. But you're right that that balance always seems to change in retrospect, one way or the other.

> I feel like I could polish any code to perfection forever.

Then you know what to work on to become an even better engineer. My recursive function for improving code has clear exit conditions. One of them indeed includes aggressive timeboxing, so on that point we're aligned.

I feel you are trying to make an argument against better code. I get it, there are very fussy programmers out there who can indeed polish stuff until the heat death of the Universe (and still be unhappy) but bringing up extremes is not very interesting in a discussion IMO.

> Is it still bad after 5min? After 30? After an hour? After a day?

Generally, time spent on code has near-zero correlation with the quality you'll get. That correlation only becomes stronger when you have a lot of trust in the person writing the code (including yourself).

As above, don't try to make managers look like the reasonable people. I've met some and I adored them but the 99% are egotistical snowflakes that will fire you the first time you say "no".

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Nobody is saying "accommodate the insufferable nerds and give them two weeks to do what junior Joe will do in 2 hours and it'll be pretty good" here in this entire thread. People are saying "maybe we the programmers should have SOME power in some decision-making as well". I am OK with my influence being somewhere between 10-15%; that's expected, I am neither a manager nor a financial stakeholder. What I am not OK with is when that number is 0-1% and sadly that has been the norm during my consulting and contracting period. And it's the main reason due to which I am trying hard to end this period right now and settle somewhere).

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