| This is like writing “mechanics hate bolts”. Yea, mechanics love to complain about metric and imperial sizes and when they don’t thread in correctly, but at the end of the day a good mechanic loves seeing a smooth running car. Similarly, a good software engineer loves it when they have a smooth running service. Updates work without hiccup and the system can be inspected to see how things are running. Having clean and maintainable code is directly proportional to the ease and pleasure of work on this service. I believe in quality over quantity and I also believe that beautiful code exists. My hatred of code comes from lazy or rushed implementations, which can and should be improved over time. LGTM culture is a product of bad management and should not be used as an excuse to ship lazy code or code written by people who hate what they do. A good engineer should take pride in their work, even on the bad days. And even when the product itself isn’t what they would personally want. |
To make it more fair, code you wrote yourself doesn't count, because you aren't an objective observer -- and more importantly, have a different relationship to it making it easier to work with since you wrote it, and often to your own preferences.
I think I agree with you, it's just that... the actual way software is written doesn't seem to allow for much clean and maintainable and easily extensible code to be written, so I'm not sure how much it matters practically.