Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nostrademons 4201 days ago
Also not shown: the part where the feature that was exhaustively tested was removed a couple months after launch because requirements changed or the market shifted.

It works both ways, and probably one of the biggest skills to being an effective developer is understanding whether a piece of code you write is likely to be thrown away shortly or whether it's going to live forever and cause umpteen headaches for the maintainer. (This itself is surprisingly counterintuitive: I have seen high-priority code backed directly by an executive thrown away a week after being written because of shifting perspectives within the organization, and I've also seen a one-character typo in a "throwaway" migration script result in restoring a million+ users from tape backup.)