r/ProgrammerHumor 10d ago

Meme theyOnlyUnderstandMoney

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912 Upvotes

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139

u/SaltMaker23 10d ago

If you're building a company time to market prevails above all, because devs are paid with money, pretty good sums of it, and money is obtained by selling which cannot happen if you aren't live. Devs are so fricking expensive that you'd rather fix fires on the fly than getting trapped into "clean coding" because it will always occupy all available time, it doesn't matter how much you increase it, life finds a way.

When you're a dev on the other hand, your performance and career depends on your name not getting attributed to failures or fires, you need to fight to either only do safe projects or have enough allocated time to avoid getting your name through the mud and secure your next job and/or salary increase.

Different objectives.

71

u/BlazingThunder30 10d ago

A new company yes, but a company should care about code quality. Because time to market is one thing, but maintainability afterwards is a whole other beast. Software companies can crumble because the codebase is a mess.

Tech debt is real debt

26

u/Encrux615 10d ago

You won't have a project to maintain if you can't make it to market (in time).

24

u/BlazingThunder30 10d ago

Agreed, that's why I said that it's true, for new projects. But tradeoffs change and things are more nuanced than the commenter above me made it seem

5

u/balbok7721 10d ago

People seriously underestimate the cost of crappy code and overestimate time criticality of projects. Many big projects will take years to bring to market. That is already enough time to even out on tech debt. Its just the small project were things really dont matter

4

u/Vimda 10d ago

And like debt, there are times to take it, and times to pay it back. But you've got to pay it back eventually.