[dools]

I think the place you can deliver the most value is strategy and leadership. There is a tremendous dearth of good communicators in this space.

I barely code anymore - the labour overseas is so cheap I can't justify spending 8 hours trying to figure out some bug ... But I've found joy in managing teams and coming up with plans and strategies and helping clients get results and things like that.

In fact it's far more enjoyable: when I was doing all the work the limit on how many of my ideas could come to fruition was my own time. Now I am able to see more of my plans and ideas come to life more quickly and that's the part that I always really enjoyed.

I've let go of trying to keep up with specific technological details... They all sort of fade into insignificance and you realise that it's all sort of the same stuff; different tactics but the same strategies. Old folks win by being better at strategy.

That's how it works in a lot of fields where the energy of youth is an advantage. I don't think tech and/or business is any different.

[mahyarm]

How do you deal with bad coding practices? Such as over complicated & verbose code and copy paste everywhere leading to an unmaintainable mess?

[dools]

Short answer: testing.

[mahyarm]

Unmaintainable copy paste code can still past tests in a degenerate way. And things like UI code and other things that majorly depends on 3rd party code definitely is harder to make proper tests for.

[dools]

Not just automated testing, quality assurance.

The job of QA is to find bugs.

The job of automated testing is to reduce the cost of QA.

With proper project documentation and separation of backend from interface using DOM templating as well as a compartmentalised, non-monolithic application architecture (ie. not using "frameworks" in the traditional sence) the code that drives an interface is not only trivial to build but also pretty trivial to replace.