Re:Goodbye, Clean Code
by sinsterizme on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:42AM
(#22025062)
This blows my mind. If I had to discuss with my teammates every time I changed their code I would be way less productive. Everyone’s a little bit watched to the code they write, but iterative improvements and bumping the quality of the codebase is way more valuable than risking a fragile ego. It’s the teams code, we all benefit from improving it.
Re:Goodbye, Clean Code
by jrochkind1 on Sunday January 12, 2020 @04:26PM
(#22029539)
You can certainly go too far in either direction (talking or not talking), but to the extent talking matters when it does, it's not about "ego", it's about 1) "What did they know that I don't" and 2) Building shared understanding of the context and decisions and architecture.
As the OP says "A healthy engineering team is constantly building trust." Sometimes you already have enough trust and shared understanding to not need a discussion, other times a discussion is good.
Or, what it might be telling you is the second person wouldn't have been able to clean it up in an evening without the first person having already spent a week or two on it. The second person was building on the first. Just because it was (hypothetically) less lines of code doesn't mean it could have been written without starting with the more lines of code and refactoring; it often takes more time/steps to get to fewer lines of code.
But don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of colleagues discussing code, not just changing each other's code without discussing it.