[mad_vill]

This is touching on something I have been thinking a lot about as I progress in my career.

The thing good and bad code have in common is the fact that it needs to updated. Either for bugs or changing business need.

So focusing on the operational side becomes much more important. Code is the trivial part. Creating systems that can be modified reliably is the hard part.

I rather have ownership over a "poorly" coded service with proper ci/cd, integration tests, monitoring, and a team that reasons about and follows strong operational processes, rather than some beautiful code in a vacuum.

[zmgsabst]

My experience is that “good” code enables all of that — CI/CD, meaningful testing, monitoring/logging, operational tooling, etc.

Making any of that work for spaghetti is rough, since it lacks the boundaries and entry points those things rely on. And even if you ostensibly have it for “bad” code, it tends to be fragile and unreliable. (As my many, many overnight pages have shown.)

Of course, that may be different perceptions of “good”.