[adrianmonk]

Nobody cares if your warehouse is neat and clean. Your customers never go in there. They just receive orders that are shipped out of it.

But if your warehouse is a mess, if the aisles of your warehouse are blocked by crates strewn everywhere (that you've been meaning to put away for ages), then it does matter if your warehouse is neat and clean because it takes forever to maneuver your forklift in to retrieve products to ship them out. If your warehouse is disorganized, and you can't find anything when you need it, then it matters.

The real trouble, I think, is when people have reasons to choose not to keep the warehouse organized and functioning smoothly (like workers who see it as drudgery or managers who want workers working on something else) and they try to excuse it by saying, "Our customers never visit."

(I don't think the person above is doing that, incidentally. I think they're just agreeing with the keep your eyes on the prize message.)

[lll-o-lll]

The difference between software and most other forms of engineering is that the internals of software are invisible to everyone but the developers. A manager walks in to the warehouse you describe above and goes “what in the literal hell? No one goes home until we clean this $&@$ up!”. A machine that has been poorly designed looks like a piece crap.

Software, if the UI looks nice the massive tangled mess inside is completely invisible to customer and manager alike. Gross inefficiencies, evil hacks, everything entangled with everything? No one can see it. “Why does it take 3 months for a tiny feature?” “Technical debt”, “ok, you can have 5% of your time budget to sort that out”…

If people could really see the software, viscerally, they would approve budgets to fix it.

[ignoramous]

> If people could really see the software, viscerally, they would approve budgets to fix it.

Tools for this exist; ex: https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/data-flow-o...

I suspect the information overload for any substantially large code base would be such that, non-engineers would look right past the complexity after the enthusiasm wears off.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Technical managers do look at code...they often don't really "see" the problems until they try to implement something tho.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah the best way to understand software (maybe even the only way) is to try to do something with it.