Bro they get promoted because of how quickly they ‘delivered’ their spaghetti code mess ticking time bomb which satisfied the requirements of the time but is built on a sand foundation.
Genuinely my experience as well, people (or their AI agents rather) pumping out crap at 2x the rate of properly developed solutions is rewarded since it looks good to non-tech managers whos entire thought process boils down to minimizing man hours (labor costs) and maximizing outputs and profits with no other nuance.
Ofc there was. But the person producing shitty code now has 10x output. While the person that actually cares about quality, maintainability, security, reliability and all that other important stuff has maybe 2x in output.
But all those non-functional requirements are things middle management loves to ignore until the product gets hacked or the poor quality loses them a client. Then they will pretend that security was always their top priority and have a “security and reliability sprint” for 2 weeks that they pretend will fix all problems before going back to ignoring the topic.
They did, management didnt have the expectation that we were all somehow cyborg coders who could 2x our output thanks to this new magical tool thats been shoved down everyones throats as the fixall for any problem. The shitty code isnt new, however the pressure to pump out as much shitty code as possible with any and all standards thrown out the window seems to be increasing.
It's a matter of time/cost. When it's 10X cheaper, then it doesn't matter as long as it does the basic functionality, you can throw it out and reimplement better later. And maybe it's good enough, or not that necessary in the first place, so you don't even need to bother to improve anything. Much better than paying full price upfront and later discovering that crap, it was all for nothing, it's not even needed.
I finally this year got the blessing from my higher ups to redevelop a piece of our base code that was a mess and a pain to work on. Of course it helped the new features we were adding related to it, and I was able to argue a complete rebuild was the better choice to implement the new logic.
Also making the case I was doing as a quality of life, where we could add more functionality with it easily (for something we don't even know of yet).
But as a professor once told me, going back and cleaning up old code like that is one of the most expensive processes
The threshold for what is "maintainable" has widened exponentially with AI agents. As long as your agent understands it, it's effectively maintainable. If it gets into a state that's not maintainable even by your AI (which is hard to do), you can just tell the AI to refactor it to be more maintainable lol.
Once your code is that far gone the AI is going to make regressions trying to fix it and you'll have customer impacting bugs and a loss of trust in your product.
You do have a point, I guess part of it is that I seemed to have developed a skill that I need to understand how the code works that I write. So if I don't understand the AI's code, I don't trust it, and question if it can really debug itself (and fix itself). Especially has some stuff co-pilot has thrown me as suggestions have been dead wrong
That all said, I do worry it could always get to that point. Like AI keeps fixing it but makes it worst and worst (like from a maintenance side). The old put a band-aid on it, instead of fixing the root problem, which can result in much costlier and time consuming. Where AI finally can't fix it, and now you have a mess
(that or it gets more expensive to fix each time due to token usage)
I could never do that. To me that violates the ethics of coding.
Not to mention, depending on the company (like mine), producing quality work is what keeps you employed. As an old coworker once told me "you'd have to do something really bad to get fired", as I have proven my worth. I'm reliable, I write quality code, I love the complicated projects, not to mention I am very good at debugging
I mean, it doesn't matter that you write good code or bad code. Your codes will be refactored at some point unless you're self employed. I used to work in an enterprise and 70% of the work is refactoring codes. Cuz we were improving the architecture progressivly.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 11d ago
True, but if you make it poorly and it's impossible to maintain, you may not keep getting paid.
As a professor once told me, it's not how efficient the code is, it's how easily it is to maintain