[pkukkapalli]

Had a boss once who insisted that all if statements should be pushed out to factory classes, and all control logic should be done by constructing a different instance of an interface. It was a pretty rigid system, but at least it did force me to write small focused classes that were easy to test.

Debated for a long time whether that methodology was stuck in the second phase or if it was actually the third. Still don't have an answer, but these days I think having a plan is better than just letting engineers run roughshod, as long as the conventions are easy to follow.

[ncann]

That just sounds like enterprisey Java to me, which I firmly believe is closer to 2 than 3.

[tambourine_man]

Programming alone vs programming in a team are very, very different occupations. A lot of what applies to one doesn’t apply to the other. I’m still painfully learning this, after all these years.

[bradrn]

Could you elaborate please?

[atomicnumber3]

I think it comes down to there being two kinds of codebases...

In the first kind, all relevant developers have deep expertise in the system, or build towards having deep expertise. There's an expectation that flexible abstractions will be used, not abused, unless it's one of those scenarios where the use outweighs the abuse. The abstractions are tomato cages, and they're there to support the system as it grows, provide some structure, but not to strangle it.

In the second kind, the default expectation is that a developer will have little to no familiarity with the system, they will be isolated from it as much as possible, and they will be given such a tightly constrained sandbox that they can't break anything outside it. You will write your little plugin, or whatever, get in and out, and you're done.

These can both be useful kinds of systems/codebases in orgs of any size. The first kind of codebase can enable an experienced team to move really fast and be extremely productive. The second kind of system can help lots of different teams of different skill levels jump in and leverage your system with little required knowledge, and thus be productive that way. So there's really no way to say one of these patterns is good or bad.

But in general if you churn in and out a bunch of replaceable cog code monkeys, probably low-paid, the second kind of system just ends up working better. Giant "enterprise" software shops like parent poster aluded to typically end up in this kind of high turnover scenario after enough finance/MBA people have been brought in, hence their bad rap.

[tambourine_man]

I have much more experience working alone, but: git alone is a breeze. I don’t need to impose myself some arbitrary constrain because I know (or think I do) I won’t abuse it. I can use the stack I consider best/am more productive on, instead of what’s fashionable this year. No linting, coding conventions, etc. Just the pure joy of problem solving.

On the other hand, on the right conditions, the amount you learn on a good team is ridiculous compared to what you’d do alone. Weeks vs years kind of thing.

[astrange]

The key insight to "at least destroying your architecture makes it easy to unit test" is that being able to unit test is not actually that important. There's other kinds of testing out there!