Re:Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers
by cookiecaper on Saturday February 13, 2010 @06:00AM
(#1122894)
As most of the comments on the post demonstrate, his demand that all software developers hate their own code more than anyone else's code is a little unreasonable. If he's been fortunate enough to always be the least competent on his team and therefore has saved himself the frustration and his co-workers only produced code which he admired, then he is definitely lucky.
That's not to say that most of us are great programmers -- most of us, as you might expect, are average programmers. It's just to say that there's a lot of code out there that's not even written by programmers at all. You get the designer who's been copy/pasting every snippet he could get his hands on until it just made the dumb thing work, you get construction workers and plumbers who were attracted to the glamor of a desk job after throwing out their backs, or whatever.
One of the last codebases I worked on was a website that ran a whole company but didn't have any ID fields anywhere and all joining or other inter-database matching had to be done by text comparison. This system was written by an ex-construction contractor who'd fallen hard on his luck, learned HTML one day, and became this company's de-facto programmer, so it makes sense that it would be like this; the concept of an ID field, after all, is not self-evident to one without training.
Much code out there is "written" by people who have no idea what they're doing. I don't mean that in the self-effacing, most-programmers-are-average-programmers way, but I mean it in the way that "your system was built by someone who was literally just as qualified as your receptionist or janitor" kind of way.
Given these circumstances, I don't think it should be an immediate writeoff if you can do better than the last codebase you were brought in to fix.
That's not to say that most of us are great programmers -- most of us, as you might expect, are average programmers. It's just to say that there's a lot of code out there that's not even written by programmers at all. You get the designer who's been copy/pasting every snippet he could get his hands on until it just made the dumb thing work, you get construction workers and plumbers who were attracted to the glamor of a desk job after throwing out their backs, or whatever.
One of the last codebases I worked on was a website that ran a whole company but didn't have any ID fields anywhere and all joining or other inter-database matching had to be done by text comparison. This system was written by an ex-construction contractor who'd fallen hard on his luck, learned HTML one day, and became this company's de-facto programmer, so it makes sense that it would be like this; the concept of an ID field, after all, is not self-evident to one without training.
Much code out there is "written" by people who have no idea what they're doing. I don't mean that in the self-effacing, most-programmers-are-average-programmers way, but I mean it in the way that "your system was built by someone who was literally just as qualified as your receptionist or janitor" kind of way.
Given these circumstances, I don't think it should be an immediate writeoff if you can do better than the last codebase you were brought in to fix.