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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

"People just starting out."

Ha, you give them too much credit.

This code is from a 10-year veteran "consultant," probably charging over $200/hour, brought on by the Global Services company hired by the Consulting Agency that Comcast brought in to assist in completing the critical time-sensitive project as quickly as possible.

It was also deemed a great success, and presentations were made about how effective it was, how smart the manager who hired the consulting agency is, and how skilled the global services contractors were who implemented it were, all only 2 weeks behind schedule—a new record for a project of this scope.

That manager got a promotion and is now VP of something or other. He sleeps like a baby and makes 100 times more than you.

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This is exactly who wrote this code. I nearly accepted a job with one of Comcast's major consulting partners. My first hint should have been 2 technical interviews in which they were impressed that I used linux... and couldn't tell me a thing about what their day to day looked like. "Oh it's always different"

When I was issued my company laptop, the software had been installed by hand (OS and all). I offered to setup an imaging system for them... but the "IT guy" from the "IT consulting firm" wasnt exactly sure what that was and needed to find out who to get approval from first...

Hey, hey, now. I did include people who never moved on from copy-and-paste too.

They understand that "good code" is code that delivers a lot of value to the person who needs it. Why hate on them for that? You just sound jealous that they make more than you do.

Maybe he has had the pleasure of being someone that gets to maintain that "good" code. I know I have.. and at Comcast no less.

That's the whole point. Code is not meant to serve the people who maintain it. Maintainability is only a concern once lack of such starts impacting your actual customers. If writing ugly code and fixing it up later is necessary in order to get shit out the door, why is that bad?

So because it satisfies the suits, he should reserve passing judgement? Try again; he is a programmer, not a suit. Hint: there exist many seperate but equally valid systems for judging worth/merit/quality.

Also, even for a suit, "Maintainability is only a concern once lack of such starts impacting your actual customers." is only true if by "actual customers" you mean shareholders. If you really want to get down to it and make an obnoxious out of place point, you can technically fuck over the customers all you want so long as doing so does not actually hurt the business (meaning: hurt the shareholders). Bonus points for figuring out how this could be done by a consulting company.

If you are a money-chasing robot, perhaps. Most businesses care at least a little about making a good product/satisfying their customers. That's good. Making life easy for your employees at the expense of your customers? That's bad.

Because if you want to be a software developer in the long term, you need to prefer the long term alternative in most cases.

A typical example is, "If we don't get something out the door, we'll be out of business. 'Shit' is something that can be shipped quickly, therefore we must ship 'shit'."

But companies that ship 'shit' generally go out of business anyway. Either their customers find it unappealing and leave, or ongoing maintenance quickly becomes so difficult and expensive that the product can not improve except by being rewritten under new management.

With something like a secure website (or script injected into arbitrary websites by a large ISP) the severity of the security vulnerabilities that tend to result from "shipping shit" often you only get one or two chances as a company.

How is that relevant? Comcast is not a software company. Shipping something that works and then never touching it again is exactly what they want.

"Good code" that delivers a lot of value and is high quality and maintainable is still better!

I'm not jealous. They don't make more than me. I said they make more than you. And I'm not hating—I'm just telling it exactly like it is, because I understand it, and it's insane, like the truth tends to be when you have huge amounts of power and money being controlled by puny incompetent humans.

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