
Stripe's take on software engineer efficiency made me angry - KiwiCoder
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1038047527898177536.html
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grigjd3
After a while, I can guess where bad code comes from. Code that is hastily
written by someone experienced is very different than code assembled by the
inexperienced and without good guidance. Feature creep also has an obvious
quality. Trying to turn these things into simple metrics is very much a
mistake.

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jkoudys
Absolutely. The best maintenance I do isn't renaming a bunch of properties, or
putting in better exception handling. It's deciding that entire features or
the basic approach to a problem is fundamentally flawed and needs to be
scrapped.

You do this work long enough, and you can usually tell in under a minute if
you're dealing with code that takes shortcuts, or a big pile of copypasta from
SO.

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sunstone
Software creation (is it really 'engineering'?) lives in the penumbra between
arts and science. This leaves it open to interpretations and conjectures from
various points of view. The definitive assessment has yet to be made.

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Silixon
This is where we revive the debate about whether programming can be creative
because it follows such rigid syntax rules. The unenlightened say it's not,
and the obsessed say it is. How do we communicate across this gap?

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rdnetto
Programming languages having rigid syntax is like English being limited to the
Latin alphabet - the opportunities for creativity lie in the combinations of
higher level structures.

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jkoudys
That's a good way to put it. The ones who think it's an uncreative field are
usually the ones who struggled through learning the syntax, and therefore
assumed that's what the hard part of the job is.

Thinking that an unambiguous syntax implies it's not creative means something
that is creative must have an ambiguous syntax. That's on its face absurd, yet
a weirdly common belief.

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zubairq
Great article. I totally agree, but I see alot of Stripe developers seem to
forget that 99% of software is maintained in large companies and outside of
their "startup" mindset where code doesn't always live that long

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commandlinefan
It says something about the state of software development in the 21st century
that I thought it was pretty brave of the author to put his actual name to
that. (And FWIW, I absolutely agree).

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dstroot
> How many hours per week do you estimate developers at your company waste on
> maintenance (i.e. dealing with bad code / errors, debugging, refactoring,
> modifying)?

The question above is mixing dealing with errors and debugging with
refactoring and modifying. I think this is the heart of the issue. One can
(and should) modify and refactor "good" code too.

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giorgioz
After the landing page I didn't even went ahead and read the report because I
dismissed it as content marketing. You can see the entire thing is targeted at
managers not at software engineers.

