[Swizec]

Well, you take a dollar amount. Then you increase it. Then you increase it some more. Because companies who can afford it will pay you pretty much anything if you can make their whole engineering team even just a few percent more productive by improving the codebase. Or can figure out very hairy issues caused by Daily WTF style situations.

For example, I have a friend who sometimes fixes bugs in compiled software running banking systems with no access to the original code and woefully out of date documentation. He gets paid some 300eur an hour in a country where the median developer salary is only about 30k eur per year (about 14eur/h)

Sure, that particular type of problem likely/hopefully isn't caused by copy-paste programming, but it is caused by the sort of endemic issues copy-paste programmers to produce.

[goblin89]

IMO, as it often turns out to be, whether or not the code is copied and pasted doesn't matter by itself.

A competent programmer borrowing code would likely factor it in in a way that won't present maintenance burden later on, and first of all would know when borrowing is appropriate. An incompetent programmer may produce problematic code even regardless of whether it's borrowed or original.

(Though I'd agree that incompetent programmer borrowing chunks of code from different sources without thinking is ‘worse’ than same programmer just writing bad code by himself—more predictability in the latter case.)

In my case, I regularly see borrowed code in projects that I maintain. As long as it's contained in an isolated module, documented (unless it's short and obvious) and used appropriately, I don't see a problem.

Interestingly, front-end code I work on seems to suffer from much worse-quality borrowing—it's like Python people lose all their discipline once they turn to JavaScript.

[Swizec]

Agreed. I do actually copypaste code in some very specific scenarios. For instance, writing a string capitalization function for Javascript and not needing a whole string processing library.

Sure, you copy paste a line of code after inspecting it, and save yourself some half hour of time on a piece of code that is not core to the problem you're solving.

But I have never seen a programmer who says "I am in the business of getting shit done, so I copy paste code" to produce good code. Anecdotal evidence and whatnot, and my argument could be a bit of a strawman, but this is the sort of canary in a gold mine that I've found.

When a developer on my team says "I just want to get shit done", is when I start preparing for a lot of internal screaming down the line. Happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.

So no, while copy-pasting on its own is not the problem, it is a good symptom to look for.

[cheald]

I actually had someone bitch me out on StackOverflow for having an answer that wasn't useful to him, and it was slowing down his "above-industry average productivity rate". I had a damn good laugh about that one.

[chubot]

Man... can I ask what led a company into the situation where they need to fix software without source code access? Did they rely on a vendor that went out of business? I imagine it is ancient software from the 80's or 90's?

[nevi-me]

To answer you, I'm 24, and an accountant by profession. From what I've seen, most banks still run some core functionality of their systems in IBM Mainframe, which includes JCL, COBOL and maybe other languages.

Because of space constraints then, file names were limited to 8 characters (someone correct me) and lines of code has fixed lengths. That already made commenting a nightmare. I have 'reverse engineered' scripts that were written more than a decade before I was born. Most have outdated documentation, filenames are a mess to figure out, and over time there have been automated conversion tools that were used to update language versions.

As I said, most of these systems still run some core functionality of the bank, and the people who wrote them ain't there no more, so banks have to shell out lots of money to either fix and maintain these, or to figure out what's happening so they can move to newer systems.

A form of anecdote could be that because IBM still make some form of x64 flavour Mainframe OS indicates that large corporates still have code that's potentially double my age.

[Swizec]

I don't know the whole story, but seeming as this was banking software I wouldn't be surprised if it was indeed written some time in the 80's or 90's and the original developers were nowhere to be found.

[nomedeplume]

i know it's not your first language but since you mentioned you like to think and understand things, the correct syntax is '80s and '90s; the apostrophe is used to indicate letter omission. incidentally, my first language was basic. didn't want to omit that :)

[nomedeplume]

Thanks for responding with a specific $ amount. I do indeed appreciate it.