Nobody cares about your clean code

Nobody cares about your clean code
felipecsl.com

But indirectly they actually do care because if the config files for Bind are maintained well then there's less room for human error and ... that contributes to overall stability of the service.

this is like telling a mechanic that people don't want them to maintain their cars, they just want a reliable car that won't leave them stranded

also, why does a php and jquery app mean it isn't clean? the better takeaway is that customers don't care about your stack

When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, I don't write tests, I don't comment/document much, I use lots of shitty variable/type names, lots of commented out code, debugging printfs, not much organization of files (often one large file).

The prototype software is write-once, read-maybe. Maybe I'll want to see what I did down the road, but more likely I'll be shortly rewriting what I did somewhere else, using the fresh state still in my head.

That next thing? If it's meaningful in any way and I want other humans (or future me) to expose their sight-orbs to it, then it'll be "clean code" to the best of my ability. While users won't care what your code looks like, they DO care about bugs, new feature turnaround, and downtime, all of which are exasperated by shitty code. You don't want to be staying up late on the weekend unfucking something you fucked up three years ago.

Don't write shitty code for other people. That includes future-you.

But seriously, they call it "tech debt" for a reason. It's not a problem until suddenly you're no longer able to add needed features to your project, because every little bit of development takes hours and weeks and months.

There are so many posts about how "Engineers Need To Learn About The Business," and yeah, it's helpful sometimes, but really there are different types of jobs. Some jobs require the engineers to understand the product and business rules, and other jobs need engineers with deep technical engineering abilities. There's nothing inherently better or worse about either! What's bad is if the job is one type and you are the other type. (Similarly, you think you want to be one type, but really you want to be the other type).

So go ahead! Fiddle with an esoteric language or framework, because there are plenty of open positions that need you.