Exactly, thank you for putting it like that.
So far it’s been my observation that it’s only the people who think like the OP who put the situation in the terms they did. It’s a false dichotomy which has become a talking point. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.
For an exaggerated, non-comparable example meant only to illustrate the power of such framing devices, one could say: “there are people who think guns should be regulated, and there are people who like freedom”. It puts the matter into an either/or situation. It’s a strategy to frame the conversation on one’s terms.
This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market.
> There is no substitute for high quality work.
You're right because there really isn't a consistent definition of what "high quality" software work looks like.
Those first three are "enterprise" or B2B applications, where the person buying the software is almost never one of the people actually using the software. This disconnect means that the person making the buying decision cannot meaningfully judge the quality of any given piece of software they are evaluating beyond a surface level (where slick demos can paper over huge quality issues) since they do not know how it is actually used or what problems the actual users regularly encounter.
What about caring and being depressed because quality comes from systems rather than (just) individuals?
I would classify all of those as "capabilities and limitations of your product"
I read OPs "good code" to mean "highly aesthetic code" (well laid out, good abstractions, good comments, etc. etc.), and in that sense I agree no customer who's just using the product actually cares about that.
Another definition of "good code" is probably "code that meets the requirements without unexpected behavior" and in that sense of course end users care about good code, but you could give me two black boxes that act the same externally, one written as a single line , single character variables, etc. etc. etc. and another written to be readable, and I wouldn't care so long as I wasn't expected to maintain it.
The reality of software products is that they are in nearly in all cases developed/maintained over time, though--and whenever that's the case, the black box metaphor fails. It's an idealization that only works for single moments of time, and yet software development typically extends through the entire period during which a product has users.
> I read OPs "good code" to mean "highly aesthetic code" (well laid out, good abstractions, good comments, etc. etc.)
The above is also why these properties you've mentioned shouldn't be considered aesthetic only: the software's likelihood of having tractable bugs, manageable performance concerns, or to adapt quickly to the demands of its users and the changing ecosystem it's embedded in are all affected by matters of abstraction selection, code organization, and documentation.
> I wouldn't care so long as I wasn't expected to maintain it.
But, if you’re the one putting out that software, of course you will have to maintain it! When your users come back with a bug or a “this flow is too slow,” you will have to wade into the innards (at least until AI can do that without mistakes).
And most users are not consuming your code. They’re consuming some compiled, transpiled, or minified version of it. But they do have expectations and it’s easier to amend the product if the source code is maintainable.
Quality of code is just not that important of a concept anymore for the average web developer building some saas tool. React code was always crap anyways. Unless you are building critical systems like software that powers a plane or medical equipment, then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI. That may be a hard pill to swallow for some.
Exactly. A lot of devs optimizing for whether the feature is going to take a day or an hour, but not contemplating that it's going to be out in the wild for 10 years either way. Maybe do it well once.
I think there are a lot of developers working in repos where it's almost guaranteed that their code will _not_ still be there in 10 years, or 5 years, or even 1 year.
And in almost all of those cases, they'd be wrong.
Interestingly, I still have some code in the codebase, which I guess makes sense because I submitted about 680K LOC (note: not all hand-authored, there was a lot of output from automated tools in that) and 2^15 is 32768, so I'd expect to have about 20 lines left, which is actually surprisingly close to accurate (I didn't precisely count, but a quick glance at what I recognized suggested about 200 non-deprecated lines remain in prod). It is not at all the code that I thought would still be there 15 years later, or that I was most proud of. The most durable change appears to be renaming some attributes in a custom templating language that is now deeply embedded in the Search stack, as well as some C++ code that handles how various search options are selected and persisted between queries.
I think this both proves and disproves the original point. Most of your code is temporary. You have no idea which parts of your code is temporary. It's probably not the parts that you wish were temporary, which will almost certainly be made permanent.
When it comes to professional development, I've almost never worked on a codebase less than 10 years old, and it was always [either silently or overtly] understood that the software we are writing is a project that's going to effectively live forever. Or at least until the company is no longer recognizable from what it is today. It just seems wild and unbelievable to me, to go to work at a company and know that your code is going to be compiled, sent off to customers, and then nobody is ever going to touch it again. Where the product is so throwaway that you're going to work on it for about a year and then start another greenfield codebase. Yet there are companies that operate that way!
I've seen mismatch in each direction..
When you get a fatter check because your code break, the incentives are not in favor of good code.
In other words, I would, when possible, absolutely make a purchasing decision based on how good the code is (or based on how good I estimate the code to be), among other things.
[0] The concept of design is often misunderstood. First, obviously, when it’s classified as “how the thing looks”; then, perhaps less obviously, when it’s classified as “how the thing works”. A classification I am arriving at is, roughly, “how the thing works over time”.
In the end software is means to the end. And if you do not get to end because software is crap it will be replaced, hopefully by someone else.
I know engineers who aren't that lucky and struggle in "enterprise" software development, where slop was a feature for decades - people making decisions won't use the software (their low paid employees will) and software monstrosities need a hell a lot of support which sometimes brings more revenue than the original purchase.
Look through the list of top apps in mobile app stores, most used desktop apps, websites, SaaS, and all other popular/profitable software in general and tell me where you see users rewarding quality over features and speed of execution.
If your goal is to break into the market with software that is dogshit from day 1, you're just going to be ones of millions of people failing their get-rich-quick scheme.
From working on many many old and important code bases, the code quality is absolutely trash.
> absolutely false.
Actually, you are both correct.
Nobody makes a purchasing decision based on code quality.
But they may later regret a purchasing decision based on code quality.
If there are people who, on principle, demand the superior product then those people simply aren't numerous enough to matter in the long run. I might be one of those people myself, I think.
That's the minimalism that's been lost.
That's why I find the group 2 arguments disingenuous. Emotional appeal to conservatism, which conveniently also props up their career.
Why all those parsers and package systems when what's really needed is dials min-max geometric functions from grand theft auto geometry to tax returns?
Optimization can be (and will be) engineered into the machine through power regulation.
There's way too many appeals to nostalgia emanating from the high tech crowd. Laundering economic anxiety through appeals to conservatism.
Give me an etch a sketch to shape the geometry of. Not another syntax art parser.