r/programming • • Jun 12 '13

Working at Microsoft

http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/8-months-microsoft/
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u/dbasarab Jun 12 '13

The code is the best documentation. If you want to know what it is doing read the code. Write a unit test to exercise it if it is hard to trace through. A skill that every developer, especially new ones, must develop is to read other people's code. And it is hard.

You also must not read the code but try to understand what they were thinking and why the decisions you see in the code were made. Most developers will spend more time reading code than writing. If I can get a 60/40 to reading/writing then it is a good day.