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Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

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Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#81

Post by Aeolun »

aprdm wrote: post #66
rramadass wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry ! This is so true. Too many people with not enough background/experience, the dumbing down of programming to appeal to the masses (hey, just use this framework and call this api), the explosion in complexity of everything because apparently all solutions have be at Google scale, babel of languages/tools etc. etc. The joy of understanding/mastery/comprehension is gone.

> The joy of understanding/mastery/comprehension is gone. Yes, and is also not rewarded. Deeply understanding a problem has much less career value than job hopping + leet code practice. We're creating a generation of senior developers who do not understand problems deeply. (And are also "senior" within 1-2 years...)

How else will you be a staff software engineer in 4 years?

Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#82

Post by croo »

Aeolun wrote: post #80
asdjlkadsjklads wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heh, makes me want to go to a code camp now. I've got ~7 years professional(?), ~11 years hobby, experience at two medium sized companies. Spent my years reinventing a ton of things, and know a fair amount of oddities on how to get things done. Combine that with a passion for idiomatic, standards, maintainable code and .. i think i'd be a decent hire. (Primary experience through the years in: Rust (current), Go, Pyth…

Nobody that hired me has ever been dissapointed by what they got, but there’s a ton of people that never hired me because I can’t tell them whether something is O(n) or O(n*n), just ‘faster’ and ‘slower’. Who the hell cares what it’s called as long as it’s the fastest it’s ever going to be. > Do you have options other than caching? Yes, but who cares since they’re all worse (for your wallet and for speed). I may stil…

Not wanting to rub salt to your wound but there is a difference between able to tell if a car went fast or slow, or definitely slower than the speed limit, or exactly 58.4km/h.

Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#83

Post by softwaredoug »

I just joined a major tech company, after consulting for 8 years all around the industry.

My take is code quality is concentrated in the FAANG level companies. They have a strong moat in just really good software engineering that leads to stable, fast reliable products.

I ask myself why this is?

I think there's something to:

- They hire the best technologists, have high standards when hiring... these folks put the effort in to make something they're proud of

- The leadership is tech literate, and understands how/where to build and payoff technical debt. What you need to build in-house, what to outsource/purchase, etc

- Because of higher tech literacy: the leadership/devs tends not to heavily cargo-cult buzzwords like "AI" etc (even though this is what their marketing depts push) and focus on the unsexy work that maters (reliable, maintainable software)

HOWEVER

Outside of the FAANG-verse, you have a variety of different cases with different incentives for code quality:

- The startups that just need to do whatever it takes to deliver an MVP before the money runs out. Lots of coding heroics to do this!

- The enterprisey big companies without strong tech leadership, they hire anyone with a pulse that can do development. These places there's often a couple smart people holding things together with lots of mediocre devs at best augmenting the smart devs, at worst moving things backwards. You also have leadership that doesn't understand how to make good tech leadership decisions, and often doesn't understand the tradeoffs carefully.

These are gross generalizations, of course, but on average with this pattern I think high quality code concentrates in the upper end of the market.

Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#84

Post by Aeolun »

croo wrote: post #82
Aeolun wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody that hired me has ever been dissapointed by what they got, but there’s a ton of people that never hired me because I can’t tell them whether something is O(n) or O(n*n), just ‘faster’ and ‘slower’. Who the hell cares what it’s called as long as it’s the fastest it’s ever going to be. > Do you have options other than caching? Yes, but who cares since they’re all worse (for your wallet and for speed). I may stil…

Not wanting to rub salt to your wound but there is a difference between able to tell if a car went fast or slow, or definitely slower than the speed limit, or exactly 58.4km/h.

That’s fine. If someone ever wants to know whether it was 49km/h or 51.3km/h we can figure it out. It’s just not knowledge that is very essential most of the time.

Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#85

Post by speedgoose »

softwaredoug wrote: post #83

I just joined a major tech company, after consulting for 8 years all around the industry. My take is code quality is concentrated in the FAANG level companies. They have a strong moat in just really good software engineering that leads to stable, fast reliable products. I ask myself why this is? I think there's something to: - They hire the best technologists, have high standards when hiring... these folks put the ef…

What about the medium sized companies?

In my opinion when a FAANG dinosaur publish some source code, the quality doesn't seem much different than anything else.

Re: Ask HN: Is average code getting worse?

#86

Post by samhuk »

jamil7 wrote: post #76
cryptica wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see TypeScript more as a bandaid patch which solves small problems but causes bigger future problems than it solves. TypeScript and its many dependencies add to the kinds of compatibility problems you allude to. I'm a strong believer that the language's type system doesn't matter that much. Statically typed or dynamically typed. It's possible to write equally good quality code in both paradigms. The key to good cod…

I feel very productive in statically typed languages like Rust and Swift but hard agree on Typescript and I’ve said it here before. It feels like the worst of both worlds, extra code and dependencies for limited type safety. The amount of times it causes some issues with compatibility or a library has missing or incorrect typings has left a bad taste in my mouth. Granted I always work on small teams or alone though.

I agree with the library compatibility issues for typescript, I've felt that pain before, but it is getting better by the day with more adoption.

I've always held the belief that the major flaw of Typescript was that it is preceded by Javascript. This caused fragmentation. If the web was Typescript first, I believe it would have been quite the "nirvana". But then again, Rome wasn't built in a day...

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