[clan]

I respect your opinion and especially your honesty.

And at the same time I hope that you will some day be forced to maintain a project written by someone else with that mindset. Cruel, yes. But unfortunately schadenfreude is a real thing - I must be honest too.

I have gotten to old for ship now, ask questions later projects.

[jstanley]

I'm in camp 1 too. I've maintained projects developed with that mindset. It's fine! Your job is to make the thing work, not take on its quality as part of your personal identity.

If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world. At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies.

I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

[couchand]

I think camp 1 would rather see ten useless things than one useful thing.

[bdangubic]

100% not what Camp 1 is or does. Their #1 goal is make it work. It is your #1 priority. So quite the opposite, Camp 2 will spin and make 100 "useful" (not) abstraction with the slickest imaginable code doing things you go "OMFG, how on Earth did you come up with this, insane" while during that development Camp 1 shipped 37 new features for its customers

[yuye]

Except one of those features has a security flaw and whoops now your entire customers file got leaked onto the darknet.

[theshrike79]

Customer pays me to make it work, not make a pretty thing that doesn't work and is over budget - but pretty.

I optimise for "make it work", that's what the deal says.

If there's extra time, I might go to step two which is "make it pretty". Meaning that I go through the code and see that it's all good and proper if we need to add features later on.

[ytoawwhra92]

> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

Unashamedly, I would, but this is a false dilemma. We can have ten beautiful and useful things.

The thing that drives the camp 2 folk crazy is that often it would have taken no extra effort (or perhaps even less effort overall) to make a good version of the thing but the people who made thing simply couldn't be bothered.

The attitude you're describing here has led directly to our world being full of profoundly disappointing objects that proliferate because they meet a minimum bar of usefulness.

People don't like the minimum bar. They'll take it if it's the only thing on offer, but they like better things.

[yuye]

>the people who made thing simply couldn't be bothered.

There is nothing I despise more than someone who doesn't care.

I remember reviewing code once, a C++ class that allocates new objects on the heap, but was lacking cleanup code to delete these objects.

"It doesn't matter if the memory leaks. Those methods rarely get called."

And he was right, during the lifetime of the application it would've likely leaked only kilobytes worth of memory. But it would've taken very little effort to write cleanup code.

I believe those that take no pride in their work will never amount for anything more than mediocrity.

[d0mine]

I don't get how camp 1 can ship more than one version (do they jump teams/companies each time?). If your code is immovable mess then how do you add features/fix bugs in time?

[Imustaskforhelp]

I think I fall in camp 1.5 (I don't fall in camp 1 or camp 2) as in I can see value in prototyping (with AI) and sometimes make quick scripts when I need them, but long term I would like to grow with an idea and build something genuinely nice from those prototypes, even manually writing the code as I found personally, AI codebases are an hassle to manage and have many bugs especially within important things (@iamcalledrob message here sums it up brilliantly as well)

> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

Both beautiful and useful are subjective (imo). Steve job's adding calligraphy to computer fonts could've considered a thing of beauty which derived from his personal relation to calligraphy, but it also is an really useful thing.

It's my personal opinion that some of the most valuable innovations are both useful and beautiful (elegant).

Of course, there are rough hacks sometimes but those are beautiful in their own way as well. Once again, both beauty and usefulness is subjective.

(If you measure Usefulness with the profit earned within a purely capitalistic lens, what happens is that you might do layoffs and you might degrade customer service to get to that measure, which ultimately reduces the usefulness. profit is a very lousy measure of usefulness in my opinion. We all need profit though but doing solely everything for profit also feels a bit greedy to me.)

[ambicapter]

> At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies.

Ah yes, if you aren't shitting code out the door as fast as possible, you're probably not shipping anything at all.

[Nevermark]

That isn't a fair reading.

[jplusequalt]

Neither is the original assertion. There are thousands of examples of exceptionally well crafted code bases that are used by many. I would posit the Linux kernel as an example, which is arguably the most used piece of software in the world.

[Nevermark]

> [...] one beautiful thing than ten useful things

They didn't say beautiful/crafted things were not necessary.

They were critiquing viewpoints that all code needs to be.

Even if we (for humorous purposes) took their 1 in 10 ratio as a deadly serious cap on crafting, 10% of projects being "exceptionally well crafted code" would be a wonderful world. I would take 1% high craft to 99% useful! (Not disjointly of course.)

[jimbokun]

Seems fair to me, responding to someone mocking people for caring about their craft.

[globular-toast]

You are not your job. Take pride in your work. Be kind to others. This is the true path.

[xienze]

> If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world.

Yeah it just takes longer and makes you miserable in the process. No biggie!

[tokioyoyo]

We will still work ~8ish hours that day, and time will pass anyways.

[ytoawwhra92]

People with this attitude never end up maintaining anything. When projects get to that phase the work becomes too difficult and boring for them, so they decide that they've "set the team up for long-term success" and move on to a new opportunity.