> You may have worked with people whose meaning of "code quality" encompassed things that you found inconsequential and a waste of effort. They may have even told you that if you didn't care about those things, then you didn't care about code quality. But that's not true. It only meant you disagreed with them about what code quality is and how to recognize it.
Who's these "people" you're referring to? This is an imaginary conversation you've added.
What I actually said was that there's a balance between design and output.
I did generalize that often product people will push too far towards output and often developers will push too far between design, but like all generalizations, I know there are exceptions (eg me).
But the crux of my point is that there are tradeoffs between the two, and thus times when it makes more sense to lean towards output and times when it makes more sense to focus on design.
What you've replied with isn't even remotely the same sentiment as the comment I made.
> You draw a distinction between aspects of code that tend to lead to better outcomes and aspects of code that don't matter. You say you know what tech debt looks like. When you look at a codebase, you have opinions on where time should be spent to improve it. "Code quality" is shorthand for the heuristics underlying those opinions.
No. Code quality is just a subjective term that means nothing in reality because everyone will have different goals in mind when they think about the purpose of the code.
So the underlying heuristics require far insight into project goals, deadlines, and resources than just "code quality".
> Instead of accepting that other, possibly dumber people get to define what code quality is,
The original reason I replied (albeit I did digress quite a bit) was to demonstrate that you cannot extrapolate how smart or dumb an engineer is from their "code quality" alone. So please refrain from calling people dumb in your rebuttals.
> own your own definition of it and use it when you communicate with other people.
That's literally what I've done.
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This comment better summarizes my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555191