Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The Uncle Bob thing is something I'm experiencing right now.

I hired a friend who was a huge Uncle Bob mark, and he kept trying to flex his knowledge during interviews with other people in the company. I didn't really think much of it and told the other interviewer that it was just his personal quirk and not to worry much.

I had him work with some junior devs on a project while I took care of something more urgent. After finishing it, I went over to take a look at how it was going on his end. I was horrified at the unnecessary use of indirection; 4 or 5 levels in order to do something simple (like a database call). Worse, he had juniors build entire classes as an interface with a database class that was "wrong".

No practical work was done, and I've spent the past 4 weeks building the real project, while tossing out the unnecessary junk.

I liked Clean Code when I read it, but I always assumed a lot of it was meant for a specific language at a specific time. If you are using it verbatim for a Python project in 2025, why?






I don't see how it is uncle Bob's fault that your friend misunderstood his book.

Judging from this thread, it seems like a lot of people have similar issues with UB's work.

It might just be that the divide of a getting-things-done developer and a bloat developer isn't really caused by Uncle Bob but merely correlates with it. I.e, good developers also agree with Uncle Bob, though apparently with a different interpretation of what he said.

Smart people read a book and critically think about it. The others think it was written by a superhuman and turn everything into religious beliefs.

Not so much UB himself, but a developer being told a book or person is authoritative / has the final word on a subject isn't healthy.



Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: