
The Problem You Solve Is More Important Than the Code You Write - treyhuffine
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-problem-you-solve-is-more-important-than-the-code-you-write-d0e5493132c6?ref=hn
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malyk
I was at a conference a few weeks ago and one speaker put up a slide that went
something like:

“Software engineers solve problems. Sometimes they solve problems with code.”

Which is how I’ve always viewed my role, but it has definitely become clearer
over my 20 years in the business of software that there are a ton of people
who just want to sit in a corner and write beautiful elegant code with no
particular purpose. Great for personal projects. Troublesome when you are
building a team to solve business goals.

~~~
tluyben2
Here on HN there are many articles (some even today) ranking where people
hammer on about performant code and database queries; never do this, don’t use
ORMs etc without even knowing any business case they are referring to. People
are calling out for people to ‘tweak, optimize and refactor’ without knowing
anything about what the reader might be doing. I find that quite a solid case
of people doing things they maybe should not be doing while spending a lot of
time on these things.

If ‘beautiful, highly optimized’ code is not a business goal then I am
wondering what money they are burning; if not their own, it could be very
worrying for the company.

~~~
Chronos309
Ok, beautiful and highly optimized code needs to be a standard in my opinion.
If it is genuinely well written, it simultaneously teaches new comers good
habits (implicit training), and makes future modifications that much easier.
These are time savers. Time is money. It is a money saver.

Conclusion: Beautiful and optimized code is a money saver.

One addendum: Optimized code results in a performant application. This means
you are better than a competing product that accomplishes the same thing but
at a slower speed. You've maybe heard: 'performance is a feature' for this
reason. This, one COULD argue, is a direct money maker.

You can then tack on words like 'slick', 'snappy', etc. to your list of
descriptors.

~~~
slededit
The problem is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've been around long
enough to see a few cycles of "best thing ever" -> "never do this". Each time
massive disruptive changes were done to the code base, and each time they were
simply ripping out last cycle's fad.

Certainly there are new things under the sun, but one should try and be
respectful of what has come before. It wasn't all crap.

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segmondy
This depends on if you are writing code for others, a company or yourself. If
you're writing code for others as your customer, then it's true.

If you are writing code for yourself, then it's totally false.

