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How good engineers write bad code at big companies

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Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#91

Post by mikert89 »

sethhochberg wrote: post #76
mikert89 wrote: post #37

what I see alot is that the syntax and overall code architecture is text book, but its the completely wrong approach that creates extremely complicated tech debt. All the code reviews will be on the syntax, and none on the big picture of the business problem, or whether the implementation is overcomplicated. in the short run (1-2 years) there is no repercussion for this, but eventually making changes will be extremel…

Its hard to have good enough requirements gathering and documentation and product design practices to let an engineer really wrap their head around a problem well enough to come up with and then consistently follow a thoughtful, long-term-maintainable design for a system during implementation. And its even harder to make sure everyone who reviews or tests that code has a similar level of understanding about the probl…

Eh, its either that, or the wrong people are getting promoted. Technical skills != business process modelling

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#92

Post by asdfman123 »

area51org wrote: post #72

Maybe it's things like 4-year tenure, or shorter tenure, or something else. But I think it's a matter of motivation, Bob. > The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ... my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That, and the fear…

No, big tech engineers are highly motivated. There's lots of money, good management, and plenty of incentive. (I'm a Google engineer myself).

The problem I observe is a fairly universal one: management doesn't care about good code, it cares about results.

It's generally hard for anyone without specific experience with a codebase to tell what you're doing with it. Management can't evaluate the value of maintenance work, so it doesn't value it at all.

People who ship sloppy code get promoted.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#93

Post by sfpotter »

I've read a few of this guys posts now and have consistently been rubbed the wrong way by them. I think I know why now. It's not that he's wrong. His analysis is reasonable and straightforward. I think it's that the basis for his analysis is ultimately a form of nihilism, coming from someone who (maybe?) used to be an idealist but was burnt by a bad experience and must now explain why believing in anything is misguided.

My instinct after reading this article is to pull back a bit and ask some larger questions. Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way? Why does bad code bother engineers so much? Are they actually misguided for feeling like bad code is a catastrophe, or is it really the fault of the broader economic sphere we all inhabit? Is it actually maturity to reconcile ourselves to drift powerlessly as faceless and titanic forces sculpt our reality? So many possible questions.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#94

Post by doctorpangloss »

matt3210 wrote: post #10

It’s always a trade off between raising the bar and making a deadline. The deadline always wins since the boss doesn’t know how to read code

Deadlines are a way to manage people. They’re fine but most deadlines are not real. There are other ways to manage people, such as paying people more in bonuses for goals.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#96

Post by Ygg2 »

godelski wrote: post #44
jeltz wrote: post #3

I don't really buy that this is the main reason. A good senior engineer is for the most part able to not write bad code from day one, just at a very low speed and with the need to ask other people frequenyly. Even if you do not know the code base or domain yet there are a lot of things you can do to avoid writing bad code. Yes, as someone new you will make mistakes and misunderstand things but a lot of the bad code I…

> A good senior engineer is for the most part able to not write bad code from day one This seems unlikely. Self contained, I'd go further and say you're not a senior if your code isn't good you shouldn't be a senior. But what is good code is in context of the codebase. It takes time to get the context of a reasonably sized codebase and no one is doing that in a single day or single week, even the wizards. I don't agr…

> I'd go further and say you're not a senior if your code isn't good you shouldn't be a senior.

You say that until you are tasked with doing impossible - three lines, all perpendicular, five green, two anti-green, seven in ten or more dimensions, any color; while customer only uses purple lines.

Last guy that worked on it committed seppuku. Rest of team is in mental ward. Your only team member is guy that programmed his entire life in PHP, and doesn't know backend's language. Just teach him.

Documentation, is spread between Jira, wiki, Markdown, ftp server and some napkins.

CI stands for continuous Indians. You send code to India, where a team will assemble it. It may take anywhere between a few minutes or few hours. But it beats GitHub actions. Make sure to inspect artifacts, the Indian team has a habit to add some of their ""bug fixes"" covertly.

But you gotta finish it by Thursday. Good luck.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#97

Post by anyonecancode »

Over my career, I've been in a big company twice. This article definitely tracks with my experience. At one company, I think management actively didn't care, and in fact my direct manager was pretty hostile to any attempts at improving our code base as it meant disruption to what was, for him, a stable little niche he had set up.

At the second, it wasn't hostility but more indifference -- yes, in theory they'd like higher quality code, but none of the systems to make this possible were set up. My team was all brand new to the company, except for two folks who'd been at the company for several years but in a completely different domain , with a manger from yet another domain. The "relative beginner" aspect he calls out was in full effect.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#98

Post by VirusNewbie »

01100011 wrote: post #86

IDK, my team at a FANG has an average tenure of around 7 years and the ones less than that are new hires. I keep getting refresher grants every year. I'm sure this article rings true for some people but not me.

github does not have a good engineering culture compared to FAANG, they've had some horrible outages and made some questionable scaling choices.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#99

Post by fragmede »

britch wrote: post #89
pxc wrote: post #36

I think, sadly, that's often "the job". My career has been good so far, all things considered, but I think it would probably be better if embracing that idea came more naturally to me. One of my first strange and unpleasant realizations in transitioning from studying computer science to "working in the real world" came in a 1:1 meeting with my manager at my first job out of school. I was complaining about code qualit…

I think about this a lot. My belief is professional programmers should not be artists. I think about other professions. A cook cannot spend time making every dish perfect. A bricklayer isn't perfectly aligning every brick. Even in movie-making there's a shooting schedule. Things go wrong and the best filmmakers know how to keep the production moving. I love the craft of programming, but I see a lot other craft-orient…

The bricklayer's building that falls over, or the cook that makes food that tastes bad and no one wants to eat and makes people sick isn't going to have a job for very long, however. And of course, the job of "cook" runs the gamut from minimum wage at a shitty diner, to being very well paid at a Michelin star restaurant. So shipping code > beautiful code, but three years from now, that one "quick and dirty hack" just to get the next version out the door has become three hundred hacks, and that tech debt is a liability preventing any movement, either fixing existing bugs or in shipping new features.

So maybe not every line of code needs to be even more beautiful than the last, but there's clearly a balance to be had. And yes, sometimes the business people are right. Sometimes they are wrong, however.

Re: How good engineers write bad code at big companies

#100

Post by minikomi »

asdfman123 wrote: post #92
area51org wrote: post #72

Maybe it's things like 4-year tenure, or shorter tenure, or something else. But I think it's a matter of motivation, Bob. > The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ... my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That, and the fear…

No, big tech engineers are highly motivated. There's lots of money, good management, and plenty of incentive. (I'm a Google engineer myself). The problem I observe is a fairly universal one: management doesn't care about good code, it cares about results. It's generally hard for anyone without specific experience with a codebase to tell what you're doing with it. Management can't evaluate the value of maintenance wor…

So it's a problem of motivation you say
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