[edw519]

In fact, I think you can tell a competent software developer from an incompetent one with a single interview question:

What's the worst code you've seen recently?

If their answer isn't immediately and without any hesitation these two words:

My own.

Then you should end the interview immediately. Sorry, pal. You don't hate software enough yet. Maybe in a few more years. If you keep at it.

I have always enjoyed Jeff's columns and maybe I'm missing a subtle point (or just taking the bait), but this may be the worst "advice" I've ever read on hn.

If someone told me that the worst code they've seen recently was their own, I'd wonder why.

I feel confident in my own ability to usually write excellent code on the first try. Sure, it may need some refactoring, optimization, and flushing out of features, but it works, it generally works well, is very well documented, and can be easily enhanced by myself or someone else. If it's not right on the first try, I will fix it before I promote it. Shame on me (and anyone else for that matter) for leaving behind garbage for someone else to inherit. I've cleaned up far too many messes to allow myself to become like that.

I'm probably not alone when I say that I love developing new code and often hate maintaining someone else's mess.

Jeff is right about one thing though, almost everything I ever inherited was crap in one way or another, probably written by someone "less than senior".

I'd rephrase the whole interview question:

"What's the second worst code you've seen recently?"

"My own."

"OK then, what's the worst?"

"Everyone else's."

That's the one I would hire.

[jballanc]

I have always enjoyed Jeff's columns and maybe I'm missing a subtle point (or just taking the bait), but this may be the worst "advice" I've ever read on hn.

Huh... I generally don't enjoy Jeff's column, but this is the first one where I was nodding my head the whole time. In fact, I had even copied the above quote from the article just to comment on it, but in affirmative agreement. To give some context, I'm on a team that is about to ship a very, very large project, and I have to say that I honestly believe my team's part to be the worst bit of it, and my own contribution to be the worst part of my team's code.

Well, maybe not really...but I can't shake this feeling every time I go in to work.

Here's why I think Jeff is right: Software, done well, is like magic. You don't see the arrays and pointers, you don't see that it was programed with objects and/or functions. You see an interface, you click some buttons, you type some words, and BAM! You get exactly what you want. At least, that's the user experience. If, however, you're the one writing the code that makes the magic work, then you know what's going on under the covers. You see the arrays and pointers and objects and functions. The magic is dead. The code is just a repulsive, heaping pile of bits with no special properties whatsoever.

If you tell me that your code is not the worst code you've seen recently for X, Y, and Z reasons-that-only-make-sense-to-a-programmer, then you've missed the point entirely.

I imagine the Wizard of Oz might have looked at his contraption and thought to himself "This is the worst hunk-a-junk illusion I've ever seen."

[SapphireSun]

Therefore, only the ignorant can be happy. (QED)

I have a kind of philosophical revulsion to this. I feel like if knowing how it works doesn't make it more magical, then something is wrong.

That said, I do know what you mean. Is there a way to fix this?

[arakyd]

I don't understand your analogy. Is the Wizard of Oz repulsed because he thinks the illusion is bad, or because he knows how it's made? Would "This is the worst hunk-a-junk implementation of an illusion I've ever seen?" be an accurate interpretation of what he means?

Jeff's post and your comment both confuse me on this point - I can't figure out when either of you are talking about quality of implementation (when I read "code" I think implementation) and when you're talking about quality of user experience. I'm not even sure if you and Jeff are saying the same thing. Jeff spends most of his post talking about bad user experiences caused by programs written by people who are probably not experts, but then he ends by saying that all programmers should hate their own code. I, and most people on HN apparently, interpret this to mean that we should all hate the quality of our implementations. Not only is this weird on it's face (surely many people who read Jeff's blog, let alone HN, have seen worse code than what they usually write themselves), but it doesn't seem to follow from the rest of the post. My reading of your comment leads me to believe that you dislike all code/implementations on general principle, but I can't tell if you even refer to the user experience at all. The second to last sentence seems to, but I can't figure out how the rest of the comment relates to it because the rest of the comment seems to be purely about implementation (except for the reference to the Wizard of Oz, which is completely ambiguous in that regard as far as I can tell).

My experience seems to be different than yours. I might have thought of software as magic when I was exposed to computers for the very first time, but as soon as I learned a little bit about how they worked none of it was really "magic" any more. A good user experience might be smooth, or quick, or intuitive, or even delightful, but I don't see it as magic. Occasionally I see something and I don't know how it was done, and it that case I want to know. I want to look under the covers, just like I wanted to know how computers worked. The connotations of "magic" hardly arise, because I immediately move past the "I can't believe that works!" stage to the "how does it work?" stage. I assume (or in the case of computers, know) there is machinery under the covers even before I see it, and I want to see it. There is nothing necessarily repulsive about the machinery to me, and in fact the machinery has its own beauty that is largely independent of the user experience. My ideal piece of software delivers a fantastic user experience with beautiful machinery, but I understand that beauty in one part does not necessarily imply beauty in the other. The user experience is generally more important than the quality of the code, but there is no law that says code has to be repulsive. We seem to disagree about that.

I would not say that my own code was the worst I've ever seen, but I am always dissatisfied with it and with the user experience it delivers because I always think it could be better. I completely agree with Jeff's Parnas quote, and I also agree that Jeff is probably an incompetent programmer in the judgement of Parnas and others like him. So I maybe I agree with Jeff's intended point. On the other hand, I think Jeff has delivered some pretty good user experiences, and I think many programmers who really don't produce great code and/or create a net increase in programmer demand can and do deliver decent, or even fantastic, user experiences. (This is probably one of the reasons why we have so many incompetent programmers and don't live in Parnas's ideal world. Relatively incompetent programmers can still deliver good user experiences, so in the short term it's expedient to deliver software that way. In the long term, we have a shit ton of deeply stacked shit and all the really good programmers are spending their time making shit shoveling tools instead of advancing the state of the art, but hey. Just another tradeoff.)

Speaking for myself, I know I'm an incompetent programmer who would not have a job in my own ideal world, but my goal is to not be that guy, and I would prefer not to hire that guy, or the guy who has never seen worse code than his own, doesn't make a clear distinction between his own level of skill and the level of skill displayed by crapware developers, does not aspire to write anything terribly ambitious from a technical standpoint, and in fact has nightmares about it. I enjoy programing, and I am more suspicious of people who say they hate software than I am of people who say that their own code is not the worst they've ever seen.

[Mintz]

The irony of you saying "almost everything I ever inherited was crap in one way or another" is that somebody probably said the exact same thing about your code. I bet you write amazing code, but when given a choice, programmers would rather have the joy of creating their own code than trying to interpret someone else's.

[jacquesm]

Let me try to sketch how bad it can get:

In the mid 80's I worked for a game company for about a year (Aackosoft, flightdeck, indy 500 on the Atari) and I inherited a project from another programmer. After reading the code for a couple of days I realized that he'd been planning his 'exit' for a considerable time. The could would assemble (the 68k part) and compile (the C part) but other than that you couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Every variable was named after a vegetable, a fruit or a plant and every subroutine after a famous person.

It took quite a while just to get things back to self documenting names, after that another month or so to restructure it to the point where it started to do what it was intended to do.

There would indeed have been much joy in writing it again, but there was just as much joy in figuring it out and getting it to work.

[jacquesm]

could = code, sorry...

and no, I'm not making this up!

[edw519]

When it comes to maintaining code, I believe there are 2 kinds of crap: subjective (I don't like it) and objective (it's crap because of these 14 specific reasons).

You're probably right about people who inherit my code. I know, when they've whined about it, I confronted them. "Please show me exactly what's wrong with it. What are your specific complaints about violations?" I rarely got an objective answer. It was usually something about formatting, indenting, variable names too long, variable names too short, I'm use to it the way we did it (wrongly) at XYZ Co., something like that.

True crap can be objectively identified by a violation such as:

- variables named so that no one except King Tut could possibly figure out what they are

- the same variables used for different purpose at the same time, usually in nested recursions

- variables named with 1 or 2 characters

- unassigned variables

- variables initiated when they shouldn't be

- division by zero

- single entry, multiple exit (heavily maintained so that now outlying cases skip critical logic)

- the same code in multiple places (only some of it maintained so that outlying cases skip critical logic)

- endless recursions (for outlying cases only, naturally)

- comments that don't agree with the code

- data base tables with no definitions either in the schema or any code (my new favorite)

I could go on and on, but you kinda get the picture. I wonder how many readers here have posted crap like this on their "wall of shame" at one time or another. It's funny the first 2^n times. Not so much fun anymore.

[mahmud]

Those are technical issues. The truly most nightmarish software to inherit is one that shouldn't have been writen to begin with: software made by people who either lack the programming skills, or the domain knowledge. Nothing worse than an accountant-turned-DBA's perl, or a system's programmer that just left you an steaming pile of MFC GUI. Worst of all, the person responsible for the mess is not long gone and forgotten, quite the contrary, he has been promoted through and he is now responsible for interviewing you to polish his brown magnum opus.

I breath a sigh of relief whenever Microsoft breaks and old DLL's compatibility: when you can't push through for an upgrade, pray for Redmond to force it.

[Update:

``The hardware-specific accounting package''

This one is truly the "winar": plain-jane boring software that for some goddamn reason depends on that old Hayes modem, or this matrix printer. I have been hired to do this shit so often it's not even funny; it tends to sneak past the initial discussions. You tick off "GUI" and "ODBC" and you're on your way to start hacking, making a mental note about "ability to print". What you don't know is that, not only do they want to convert the old Access package to an intranet web app, but they also want it to print receipts using the "receipt printer" -- a custom made piece of pain that uses the parallel port for data, the serial for control, and two RJ45s to whistle the Danish national anthem on error. FUCK!]

[mahmud]

Now I can't sleep (why did we have to talk about bad code?)

``The Windows 3.1 Guru''

1) That guy who knew too much about Windows 3.1 internals and never thought this newfangled "Windows for Workgroups" or "95" would never take off. Thank you, sir. Treating obaque structures for the unsigned chars they are has never posed a problem for me. All the documentation I needed was in those 4 pages of macros you left me (completely unnecessary, given the clarity of their octal values, btw) Indeed, 10 years later, the low nibble of the AL register held an integer index into your very own "stash area" just below the PSP (task_struct for linux weenies) where you kept all the open file handles. Clever of you, reusing every bit of the process memory, specially the unused parts of the MS DOS header format. (long story about this destructive log-rotate elided)

Your share custody of this award with Mr. EE.

2) Mr. Electrical Engineer, how can I forget you? We all know it's all signals and gates down there, so, yeah, it was refreshing to see them again! I can't believe you rolled your own signal-driven layer on top of the Win32 message system. The ordering system couldn't have been done any other way. Looking at your code put a bar over my head, sir, you have asserted me. And to be honest, Visual C++ needed your linguistic extensions; we all know, code runs faster when it looks more and more like Fortran.

[wglb]

These would be richly funny if they were not so entirely true.

[kragen]

These are awesome.

[sutro]

You had me at "steaming pile of MFC GUI."

[kragen]

Some of these "violations" are good ideas in some contexts. Tom Duff has written a pretty good, clear case for "single entry, multiple exit" in the form of multiple conditional return statements in a function. And Rob Pike has made a pretty clear case that this:

        for(i=0 to 100)
                array[i]=0;

is better than this:

        for(elementnumber=0 to 100)
                array[elementnumber]=0;

But that involves variables named with 1 or 2 characters.

The rest I pretty much agree with, except in very unusual cases.

[araneae]

Oh god... I had a partner in school that would name any variable x and then reuse it ad infinitum... what a nightmare.

[_pius]

I'd assumed that was intentional irony. :)

[akeefer]

I think Jeff is exaggerating a bit with his phrasing, but I think there's an important point there: humility is always important, and it's the only way you ever improve. As soon as you start being really satisfied with your own work, you stop trying to improve it, and that's a dangerous point to be at. Most of the best programmers I know personally are all highly self-critical about their work.

I also think it's important for one's job satisfaction and enjoyment of life that you take pride in your work and can be proud of your accomplishments, and I think it's important to be able to juxtapose that level of satisfaction with a constant drive to improve (I actually blogged about that topic a couple of months ago http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/it-can-...)

It's also far too easy to assume that everything written by everyone else is crap simply because it doesn't map to how you would solve the problem, and while some of it certainly is crap, it's important to be charitable in your analysis there. Becoming better means being open to learning from other people's ways of doing things, and being a good teammate means giving your coworkers the benefit of the doubt and assuming that if something doesn't make sense to you or seems ugly, perhaps it's because the problem is more complicated than you thought, or perhaps they had to inherit some ugly legacy code, or perhaps the problem domain just wasn't well understood at the time the code was first written.

[jseifer]

As someone who has done some code reviews recently, I can tell you that my answer would definitely not be "My own." :)

[Periodic]

Get out, see the world, look at other peoples' code (particularly the stuff they don't release publicly), and I can guarantee you will be surprised at what people can make run.

I believe there is a saying that there will always be [code] better than [yours]. The opposite is also true: There is always code out there which is worse than yours.

[Tichy]

"but it works, it generally works well, is very well documented, and can be easily enhanced by myself or someone else."

Yeah, but maybe for you "excellent, clean code" means you have moved everything into XML configuration files. I thought the general consensus was that real experts can never know that they are experts, therefore your claims would make me wary of your skills.

Isn't there always a way to write things even better, cleaner, more effective, more modular, whatever? In that sense I think all of my code sucks. I am sure some people out there write worse code than I do, but I am also sure there is much better code.

If you think you are so good, are you even still trying to improve yourself?

The only way I see to write "perfect" code is to adhere to some standard perfectly. Like J2EE development: you have strict rules for putting stuff into XML files and so on. So if you did all that, and raked in the money, you can call your code "perfect". It would still suck, though.