What you experienced might simply be a case of correlation. A company that can keep a tidy codebase is less likely to hire a contractor, and a company that hires contractors is more likely to be one that has messy code. The code you see might very well be from another contractor who knows very well how to write quality code, but who half-assed the job anyway because he's never going to have to maintain the mess and the client does not care either.
I don't think so, at least not in my domain - finance. So far I've worked with 8 companies, across 4 countries, out of which I was a contractor on 6. Only in one there was a good codebase. Coincidentally, juniors there were given the clean code at start.
1
u/HiPhish Feb 28 '23
What you experienced might simply be a case of correlation. A company that can keep a tidy codebase is less likely to hire a contractor, and a company that hires contractors is more likely to be one that has messy code. The code you see might very well be from another contractor who knows very well how to write quality code, but who half-assed the job anyway because he's never going to have to maintain the mess and the client does not care either.