<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: "The Culture Where Everybody Else's Code is Crap"
excerpt: "Subjectivism rears its ugly head in development"
categories: blog
date: 2017-12-08T02:00:00-06:00
---

<center><figure>
<img src="/images/trash.jpg">
<figcaption><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/YzSZN3qvHeo">Source: <NAME></a></figcaption>
</figure></center>

Sturgeon, a deeply pessimistic man, has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law">law</a>.  The law is simply this: "90% of everything is crap".  

It seems that we've taken that to heart, particularly in the area of software development.  With few notable exceptions, it's pretty commonplace to deride other people's code, and I often here exhortations of "this code is crap", when people have to make adjustments to other people's work.

This is a problem in software development.  The incredible hubris it requires for most people to determine the worth of other's code.

Being told your code is garbage it tough, and it is personal, and it can be very emotional.  I once maintained this testing infrastructure; I took over from somebody else who moved on to a different role. In his spare time, he would go through and re-write all the code I wrote -- without telling me.  Now, was my code bad?  It did what it was supposed and was documented.  But I'll never know if there were things I could have done better, because he never told me why he was rewriting it.  I would just learn that my offerings had been found wanting when I would do a pull of the code, and see what had been changed.  It wasn't even his job to look at the code any more.

Why do we have to treat and belittle and undermine people in this manner?  Why do we have to sit around and judge somebody's efforts as wanting?  A lot of times in Operations, the goal was to automate something, so the code is just a little script, a piece of fluff that becomes so integrated into the system it's suddenly mission critical to have it exist.  But it wasn't written in that manner, so why bemoan somebody's effort to make the job easier?

<u>Formal</u> code reviews are an important standard of learning, and a relevant need in any software engineering job.
<commit_msg>Changed date<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: "The Culture Where Everybody Else's Code is Crap"
excerpt: "Subjectivism rears its ugly head in development"
categories: blog
date: 2017-12-15T02:00:00-06:00
---

<center><figure>
<img src="/images/trash.jpg">
<figcaption><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/YzSZN3qvHeo">Source: <NAME></a></figcaption>
</figure></center>

Sturgeon, a deeply pessimistic man, has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law">law</a>.  The law is simply this: "90% of everything is crap".  

It seems that we've taken that to heart, particularly in the area of software development.  With few notable exceptions, it's pretty commonplace to deride other people's code, and I often here exhortations of "this code is crap", when people have to make adjustments to other people's work.

This is a problem in software development.  The incredible hubris it requires for most people to determine the worth of other's code.

Being told your code is garbage it tough, and it is personal, and it can be very emotional.  I once maintained this testing infrastructure; I took over from somebody else who moved on to a different role. In his spare time, he would go through and re-write all the code I wrote -- without telling me.  Now, was my code bad?  It did what it was supposed and was documented.  But I'll never know if there were things I could have done better, because he never told me why he was rewriting it.  I would just learn that my offerings had been found wanting when I would do a pull of the code, and see what had been changed.  It wasn't even his job to look at the code any more.

Why do we have to treat and belittle and undermine people in this manner?  Why do we have to sit around and judge somebody's efforts as wanting?  A lot of times in Operations, the goal was to automate something, so the code is just a little script, a piece of fluff that becomes so integrated into the system it's suddenly mission critical to have it exist.  But it wasn't written in that manner, so why bemoan somebody's effort to make the job easier?

<u>Formal</u> code reviews are an important standard of learning, and a relevant need in any software engineering job.

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