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Software engineers hate code

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Re: Software engineers hate code

#81

Post by jvans »

andix wrote: post #77
weinzierl wrote: post #35

I'm not so sure about software engineers. We often value working solutions even if the code base is not perfect. I certainly do and I very much agree with Joel Spolsky in his classic: " Things You Should Never Do, Part I "They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch." [1] (Emphasis his.) Where I'm 100% sure is that consultan…

Im a big advocate of rewriting code from scratch. Because on a rewrite you have a much better starting point. You have a (mostly) working solution, you understand the problem much better than on the first attempt, you have some tests and some data. Most of the time you don't rewrite it 100% from scratch, often you can copy a lot of code from the old solution. To utilize all those benefits you can't rewrite everything…

The incrementally part is extremely important and often overlooked. I have seen project after project attempt some major big bang rewrite that always takes way longer than expected, delivers less value than promised, and causes problems in areas that used to work fine. We often understand some big picture things better as time goes on but there's a thousand small decisions baked into the existing code that are very easy to overlook

On incremental improvements you should be able to stop what you are doing within a week or two and be ok with leaving the code like that for a long time.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#82

Post by jvans »

lisasays wrote: post #78
weinzierl wrote: post #35

I'm not so sure about software engineers. We often value working solutions even if the code base is not perfect. I certainly do and I very much agree with Joel Spolsky in his classic: " Things You Should Never Do, Part I "They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch." [1] (Emphasis his.) Where I'm 100% sure is that consultan…

Of course Joel was wildly hyperbolizing, to the point of absurdity. Code gets re-written from scratch all the time, for perfectly legitimate reasons. As even Joel Spolsky knows. He just meant that you should be aware of the trade-off, and that most of the time , you probably don't want to re-write from scratch. But "Never do X" sounds much catchier. And succeeded in getting the article shared and quoted infinitely an…

I don't think this is hyperbole, i completely agree with it as written

Re: Software engineers hate code

#83

Post by ranting-moth »

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 and I'm not looking forward to it. There's nothing in it for me and I'll get asked why my wall wasn't OK in the first place?!

Re: Software engineers hate code

#84

Post by zirgs »

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…

They prefer maintaining existing code until they get a project that's full of legacy stuff and nobody wants to replace it, because it works (most of the time at least).

Re: Software engineers hate code

#85

Post by psychoslave »

That is non sense. Like any peace of art, code can be a delight to contemplate or an awful experiment that was done as is just because, see, it's possible.

Of course 99% of everything is crap, and no one like to ingest crap.

Add to that impossible deadlines and usual exponential accumulation of hot fixes to a point where a bright new product will be more effective than paying the technical debt. Crafting software is on far worse road than most form of art.

All that said, yes, there are great peaces of code that are a delight to contemplate.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#86

Post by beebmam »

psychoslave wrote: post #85

That is non sense. Like any peace of art, code can be a delight to contemplate or an awful experiment that was done as is just because, see, it's possible. Of course 99% of everything is crap, and no one like to ingest crap. Add to that impossible deadlines and usual exponential accumulation of hot fixes to a point where a bright new product will be more effective than paying the technical debt. Crafting software is…

I like contemplating all code and thinking about ways to improve it. I've made a career of being a code janitor.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#87

Post by jacurtis »

austin-cheney wrote: post #73
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…

Sure. Of course there are actually software developers out there in the world that read and write code. After all, that's where all this software in the world actually comes from. But for the other 85+% of people in the profession its basically a game of AdLibs. Fill in the blank. That's why there is such heavy reliance on things like frameworks, dependencies, and Invented Here Syndrome (people who don't trust their…

> But for the other 85+% of people in the profession its basically a game of AdLibs

This is so true. I work at a fairly small organization (~35 devs). Large enough to see roles form but small enough that I can tangibly see everyone's contributions. I work SRE, so I see lots of code from all the teams and ultimately talk to almost all the devs.

In our impressive enterprise-level codebase (our SaaS product has average annual subscriptions in the range of $1.5M per customer), there are probably 3 developers that wrote 80% of the codebase. I can name them all and call them up. But I said we have 35 devs in the organization. So what do they do? Mostly little things. Flipping a conditional or making a slightly more explicit test case to fix an unexpected edge case we experienced.

Most of these 32 other engineers are solving simple problems, basic refactoring, and so forth. Not too different from the adlib, fill-in-the-blank analogy you provide.

Also, to be clear, it isn't like we hired 3 seniors and expect them to write all the code. These are just groups people fall into naturally.

The reality is most software engineers have only ever done the adlib style work and have built an entire career around never solving any real problems. They know just enough syntax in a language to solve the little problems and with software, there is a near infinite supply of these little problems.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#88

Post by kodah »

Reading this article I realize how different I am from, I guess, some of my peers. I do like working on new things, but methodically shaping old software, bringing it up to date, and all the tactical thinking you need to employ to do so is very fun. Microservices are okay, and I use them mainly when I have a particular part of a codebase that's best suited to scale on its own. Outside of that, I'm a big fan of starting with monoliths that are written so they can be decomposed at a later date. There's something really nice about a well put together codebase.

Stack overflow is probably another place I differ from other engineers. I'll use it to discover patterns I'm not aware of, but I'm much more inclined to actually Ctrl+click and look at how a thing is implemented and it's sibling methods. Of course, you need well put together local configuration to do all that. I'm always looking for ways to keep my debugger in-tact, even when dealing with things like secret storage on a zero trust network. I use flags a lot for this that let me use mock-local responses.

Then again, I work on infrastructure stuff. The kind of applications I work on have to exist for a long time because of internal contracts and dependencies. Maybe this piece is more aimed at product SWEs.

Re: Software engineers hate code

#89

Post by VirusNewbie »

kodah wrote: post #88

Reading this article I realize how different I am from, I guess, some of my peers. I do like working on new things, but methodically shaping old software, bringing it up to date, and all the tactical thinking you need to employ to do so is very fun. Microservices are okay, and I use them mainly when I have a particular part of a codebase that's best suited to scale on its own. Outside of that, I'm a big fan of starti…

Yeah i’m a swe SRE and i love going into a moderately well architected application and making it even better or more scalable. It’s fun!

Re: Software engineers hate code

#90

Post by kmoser »

elygre wrote: post #12
usrbinbash wrote: post #6

> Don't write new code when you can use, improve or fix what already exists. If you must write new code, write only what you need to get the job done. While the article resonates with me alot, I would like to, in the best spirit of the article, propose an addendum to that line: When modifying existing code, do a very careful cost-benefit analysis; On the one side is the cost of a rebuild. On the other side is the pro…

I notice that on your “one side”, you have the cost of the rebuild — but not the “projected cost of keeping this thing and maintaining it”. That’s a common fallacy of programming: the existing code is convoluted and hard ti maintain, but the new code I would replace it with will be much better and much cheaper to maintain.

In addition to projected cost to maintain, there is also the potential ill will you are continuing to generate with your customers if the existing buggy/legacy system affects them. Your reputation with your customers matters. This is one of the biggest factors I see companies ignore all the time.
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