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Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis by shunya on Monday July 07, 2014 @02:45PM (#8000552)
Love this post. Brings up the question of are we solving problems are merely difficult puzzles? "Modern programmer culture fetishizes complexity as a status marker or tribal initiation ritual"
Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis by nmrm on Monday July 07, 2014 @02:58PM (#8000626)
I wonder if some of this is the bored engineer phenomenon? I find that when I'm writing actually difficult code, it almost always comes out clean, simple and easy to read.

It's when I'm churning out ridiculous amounts of front-end kluge that I start over-engineering or introducing complexity and indirection where it's totally unnecessary.

This seems like a particularly cogent hypothesis for the web, where a majority of the programming is not very intellectually stimulating* but is simultaneously time-consuming and mentally taxing.

* IMO and in my experience, mileage may vary. And this isn't to say you don't need to be intelligent. But requiring mental energy != intellectually stimulating.

Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis by spacemanmatt on Monday July 07, 2014 @03:00PM (#8000640)
Some problems fit more cleanly into code than others. These get more attention when it's clear that a cleaner solution is yet unimplemented.