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Software engineers hate code

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Re: Software engineers hate code

#131

Post by zeroonetwothree »

JohnFen wrote: post #8

> This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It's why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Except that I've met lots of engineers who were the opposite. They hate greenfield projects and prefer maintaining existing code. I noticed this broad division of personality early in my ca…

I like both types of work. It’s fun to do greenfield projects because of less maintenance and the ability to do it the way you want. But it’s also fun to take something years old that’s barely working and try to gradually improve it while minimizing down time.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#132

Post by faitswulff »

JohnFen wrote: post #8

> This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It's why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Except that I've met lots of engineers who were the opposite. They hate greenfield projects and prefer maintaining existing code. I noticed this broad division of personality early in my ca…

This article on makers versus menders highlights the differences between those who prefer greenfield and those who don’t pretty well: https://corgibytes.com/blog/2015/08/14/makers-vs-menders/

Re: Software engineers hate code

#133

Post by 0xEFF »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #129
riku_iki wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason to like working on existing code is that infra is usually very complex nowdays, and for greenfield project you need to do lots of boring tasks to bootstrap it, and for existing code it is already bootstrapped by someone.

Not just infra. It’s the tests, it’s the crud, its getting clients and config setup, it’s banal decisions around copying existing patterns or trying to refine them for next gen copy pasting. It’s fun early in career, but gets boring fast IMO. These are good things to have junior and mid eng cut their teeth on.

The sweet spot is for someone with deep experience to lay down the skeletal structure of the tests, rpc, infra, lifecycle, etc… then hand it off to a broader team who could learn the intention behind the decisions.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#134

Post by riku_iki »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #129
riku_iki wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason to like working on existing code is that infra is usually very complex nowdays, and for greenfield project you need to do lots of boring tasks to bootstrap it, and for existing code it is already bootstrapped by someone.

Not just infra. It’s the tests, it’s the crud, its getting clients and config setup, it’s banal decisions around copying existing patterns or trying to refine them for next gen copy pasting. It’s fun early in career, but gets boring fast IMO. These are good things to have junior and mid eng cut their teeth on.

Yeah, sorry, I personally call it dev infra

Re: Software engineers hate code

#135

Post by bloqs »

zer8k wrote: post #105
ranting-moth wrote: post #83

Using a house analogy, I don't hate other people's houses. I hate it when other people blow a hole in the side of my house to put in a new window. They blasted a hole through two walls because it was the quickest way. Then just taped some plastic over the second hole. The project manager said it's still summer and we don't really need that wall at the moment. I know who will have to fix the wall when the winter comes…

A follow up analogy is more typical in my experience. The foreman says that we should reinforce the walls. The PMP certified 6 sigma ninja Project Manager insists that the reinforced walls aren't necessary because no one is going to put anything on the wall. We will revisit the wall later when we the city tells us to enforce new wall codes. No more than 6 months later a contractor tried to add a shelf to the unenforc…

"The PMP certified 6 sigma ninja project manager" had me rolling

Re: Software engineers hate code

#136

Post by praveen9920 »

It’s not 100% true. It depends on how well the code was written and documented. When we see patterns or complex code which are different from what we are used to, it takes some amount of effort to understand and to make changes.

code that is simple, documented and well written is best thing any developer can inherit.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#137

Post by lolinder »

djangelic wrote: post #56
soneca wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am one of those who prefer working on existing code. I like making things better, understanding how a code works is thrill, adding new features on existing premises. I am also an amateur fiction writer, and I notice the same thing in it. I like planning, but the first draft writing is a chore to me. An effort to vomit all my ideas as words. Then, I love rewriting. Revisiting what I wrote and improving it, fixing it…

I'm similar, and I've found AI to help with this. I'm able to guide the AI to write the first draft, then I go in and rewrite it. It's helped remove that frustration at the first draft.

What model do you use for this?

Re: Software engineers hate code

#138

Post by Falkon1313 »

>Senior engineers hate extraneous code. They hate seeing time and effort invested in building yet another solution to an already-solved problem. [...]

>Don't write new code when you can use, improve or fix what already exists.

Caveat: Refusing to write new code often means pulling in and/or writing a whole bunch of extraneous code.

Senior engineers also hate dependency hell, having to patch other people's code because upstream hasn't fixed it yet, knowing that might break on the next update, yoinking in massive complex frameworks and libraries when you could've just used a few simple functions, and having lots of kludgy plumbing code to wire up all those third party dependencies and generic abstractions.

All those things that people do just because it's best practice not to "reinvent the wheel". All those things that require extra work, maintenance, and system resources, but aren't directly related to solving the business problems. All that time wasted not even working on the valuable domain logic.

And then when you do eventually get around to implementing or modifying a domain case, can you even find where the domain code is in all that mess of extraneous code?

Re: Software engineers hate code

#139

Post by fzeindl »

JohnFen wrote: post #8

> This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It's why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Except that I've met lots of engineers who were the opposite. They hate greenfield projects and prefer maintaining existing code. I noticed this broad division of personality early in my ca…

I like both. Greenfield projects can be pretty boring when there isn't something special about the functionality or a new architecture to try out, but it feels good to spurt out stable features when you know what you are doing.

Repairing / fixing / retrofitting an old code base always has it's wonders. I've seen much code in my life that was in a bad shape and my approach for fixing was seldomly the same, it was always tailored to the team and situation.

To rephrase from Tolstoy: "Good code bases are all alike, every bad code base is bad in it's own way."

Re: Software engineers hate code

#140

Post by coding123 »

ranting-moth wrote: post #83

Using a house analogy, I don't hate other people's houses. I hate it when other people blow a hole in the side of my house to put in a new window. They blasted a hole through two walls because it was the quickest way. Then just taped some plastic over the second hole. The project manager said it's still summer and we don't really need that wall at the moment. I know who will have to fix the wall when the winter comes…

it's not a good analogy when it's not realistic. How often are people walking down the street blasting holes in peoples houses to add windows?
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