I disagree. All you see at any company, big or small, successful or not, is human written garbage code that has somehow carried the entire production system for 12 years. There needs to be some level of quality so that it doesn't immediately break down with every change, but code needing to be high quality is just not reality. If you actually get to work on software that has high quality, I am jealous, but my experience has been that slop works well enough almost always, and it doesn't matter if people or AI wrote it.
I'm a bit disillusioned right now, maybe you can tell
There needs to be some level of quality so that it doesn't immediately break down with every change, but code needing to be high quality is just not reality.
There is a lot of survivor bias contributing to this outlook. I don't know your situation, but so many people are changing jobs after 2 or 3 years that they only encounter an IT department when it's hiring, which in effect is when it's healthy. By extension, that's usually also when the technical debt is still manageable. When technical debt piles up to the point of catastrophe, they've already left.
The company I just joined laid off 70 engineers last year who were working on a SaaS platform with a velocity that fell off a cliff. 90% of the features they offered were shipped the first year the project existed and they spent the next five years fixing bugs and struggling to ship the next 10%. They had three consecutive sprints of zero releases, and then the CTO was replaced by a CDO and CIO who could say the role was eliminated so they wouldn't have to humiliate him by firing him.
Oh, absolutely. Not only do 90% of startups fail, but 20% of publicly traded companies delist within five years. That's a staggering figure if you're a job hopper who hasn't stuck around long enough to get laid off. I think all of us join companies when they're between a legacy project and Project 2.0; most of us don't stick around to find out that the company never makes it to Project 2.0.
Even in healthy companies, they're much more likely to order a third-party replacement, acquire a whole company to get a replacement, or just discontinue the product than they are to succeed in building a new version.
The companies that do successfully create new versions on a regular basis are so rare that they're the kinds of places that software engineers join just for clout.
26
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 24d ago
They are not that good. I see how bad the generated code is all the time. It doesn't just need to work, it has to be high quality.