Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis
by biscarch on Monday July 07, 2014 @03:07PM
(#8000685)
To bolster this argument. I made my consulting money off coming in to fix projects that had been churned out like this. The issue is real enough to warrant good money to fix.
Re:Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis
by michaelochurch on Monday July 07, 2014 @03:10PM
(#8000707)
To be fair, businessmen are short-tempered and flightly. They're like 15-year-olds who love one band one week and hate it the next. You have to make impressions-- flashy ones-- quickly because they have no ability to judge code quality, and can only tell who seems to be working fast.
In this light, isn't the "get it out quickly" strategy (maintenance be damned) exactly what they've asked for? In an industry where programmers are business subordinates, not true professionals, should anything else be done?
I am playing devil's advocate insofar as I agree with you. (I also think creators worth their salt want to see their work through, which means they're already doing "maintenance" work by the time they're finished.) However, I don't see how anything else can become the norm, given that The Business sees us as a cost center and a commodity.
I find the latter often appreciate the place and purpose of types more clearly than the former, even if the former would benefit as well from having concise encodings of intent in the design and creation phase.
This bias is prevalent in dyn-lang/consulting-oriented communities, often because they are churning out projects and dumping them on their clients/employers.