Is Good Code Impossible?

by fogus • 16 years ago

94 49 16 years ago

phaedrus• 16 years ago

His story will resonate with anyone who's written software for business.

At my very first "real" programming job, my boss thought that this was how you motivate programmers - take whatever the real deadline is and cut the time in half, on the theory that the programmers will take twice as long as you give them anyway. I was pretty upset by this, because by being lied to about what the real timeframe was, we made a number of unsound technical decisions thinking we didn't have time to do things right. I don't think being lied to caused us to magically be able to get an app out the door faster - what being lied to about the schedule actually caused was for us to produce code that wasn't a good foundation for future changes.

jacquesm7• 16 years ago

In practice though, given twice the amount of time there will not magically be a twice as good solution. And many times you'd find that the solution would actually be exactly the same.

Give me 24 hours to do a job and I'll do it, give me two weeks and I'll procrastinate for 13 days and then do it in the last 24 hours. That's exaggerating, but not by much and I'm not sure I like to know myself that much.

ido4• 16 years ago

I think I had the same boss as you in my first "real" job...Thankfully the experience taught me to choose my employers more wisely in all subsequent jobs.

elviejo• 16 years ago

This is a big dilemma for me. Because shouldn't making the code the right way be faster?...

This is something that gave me grief for a long time until I realized that I was thinking about running a marathon not a sprint.

patio112• 16 years ago

Do they not teach Defense against the Dark Arts at university these days? "We can incorporate that new feature, boss. What feature do you want me to cut? I can get you expiring coupons but the store locator will have to go. Your call, you get paid the big money to make the important decisions."

jacquesm7• 16 years ago

Joe Newbie says he can do it, why can't you. By the way you're up for your annual review next week, maybe you can find some time somewhere because this feature is sorely needed ;)

Big companies have their own way of dealing with that sort of thing, you might get away with it in a company where there are not enough people waiting to take your place (sometimes literally).

And you can only pull that one so often before it starts to look like you're using it as a way to slack.

Maybe a better way to do this would be to say you'd do both but it will have a such-and-such effect on the deadline we all agreed on when taking on this project. That way you don't have to make it seem as though there is only a 'you can't have both' solution.

The other side of this coin is that any programmer will normally speaking use all the ram, storage, run time, CPU cycles and wall clock time available to implement something.

And make sure you do that in email, not verbally.

Office politics like this is one of the bigger reasons why you won't find the best-of-breed programmers in offices like that, or at least not for long.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

"Joe Newbie says he can do it, why can't you?"

"Other people's inability to do basic project estimation has no bearing on the issue at hand."

Why is software the only field where people allow themselves to be bullied into ignoring basic arithmetic? I was in a kitchen shop the other day, and the sales guy had no problem rearranging things to modify the final price, but there was a list of components in front of us at all times, broken down by price. Pick and choose what you want.

That's exactly how software estimation works too. If you add something to the scope, it gets added to the budget. There's simply no room to do otherwise.

mattmanser• 16 years ago

He is a full-time contract developer, Gorrila-Mart was a new client.

This is about a contractor being unable to manage a client, not an internal developer being unable to manage management.

praptak3• 16 years ago

"I can get you expiring coupons but the store locator will have to go."

"You are not a team player. Do both or I'll get you replaced with another resource."

patio112• 16 years ago

Well, I'll admit, that is one risk that Japanese salarymen don't have to deal with. That said, are you sure that is realistic, and not just engineer-is-totally-terrified-of-confrontation talking? It is a seller's market for engineers, even at big megacorps. A manager would have to be insane to threaten firing over "We're going to miss that deadline if you add this", especially because firing guarantees that the deadline gets blown and everyone in the room knows it.

ekidd• 16 years ago

I used to make a living building software for fixed prices. To make a profit, I had to prevent scope creep.

My most effective scheduling tool was a list of proposed features, each with an attached estimate. The client suggested features, I estimated them, and the client chose the order of implementation.

If the client wanted to add, remove, or reorder features, great! We'd get out the list and make new estimates. The schedule and cost would change based on those estimates. By making the schedule highly "visible", and working to update it with the client, I gave them what they wanted (fine-grained control over "what" and "when" and "how much") without trying to stuff 6 weeks of features into 2 weeks. And if I estimated something incorrectly, I didn't charge for the extra work.

I can remember only one client who liked to bully his contractors. (He was also bad about paying his bills.) I wrapped up that project quickly, and politely refused any further work, even when he offered me a small fortune.

DanielRibeiro• 16 years ago

Uncle Bob (one of the founders of Agile manifesto, author or Clean Code and Clean Coder) commented this week (http://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/19904664214): Never allow a manager to convince you to break your disciplines in the interest of speed. It'll just make you go slower.

azanar3• 16 years ago

There's a lot to hate in this sort of passive-aggressive yet obsequious stance of project management. It is akin to the Agile practice of nailing notecards to a wall, and then forcing a territorial pissing battle carried out on that same wall later. It doesn't matter what is on the wall, but the surface area must remain the same, relative to some maximum achievable surface area metric we scoped out somewhere else, presuming ourselves to be perfect at knowing how long things will take.

It all seems so amazingly childish to me. But I'm not surprised; ask anyone from either party battling it out on the wall, and the response will be about as substantive as "they're such whiny little babies, and I need to cover my ass from their inevitable fuck-ups". So we force on them responsibility in the most condescendingly smarmy way possible, by recognizing and granting weight to their authority while at the same time sneering at it and throwing them binary decisions, as though that was the real problem.

The real problem is culture, not features. Only a small part of the rant the original author wrote was about the features of the product he was developing. A good portion about it was about a culture that didn't give a shit about everything else in code except the features; organization, readability, maintainability, and everything else don't matter. They knew full well that this was not a "throwaway" product based on the objectives they laid out, but used "throwaway" like this magic word that had no prerequisites, and was just a synonym for "finish it faster".

They could've asked for neither feature, and I would bet code would've still sucked, because developing maintainable code is far more difficult than slapping together a roughed-out, buggy first pass. But the culture believed as a tenet that maintainable code was not important; and that belief is probably about as easy to scour out as the outlandish beliefs of political pundits.

Adopting an attitude of defensive compliance would only make the culture within more vulnerable to bullshit like this. The culture was already based on childishness, and behaving like a child would add more validation to the culture. Bare in mind it's not the tone of the defensiveness I am calling childish, it is the content. The template response quoted by patio11 is just as childish, even if you imagine it spoken in a professonal, dignified tone. It deflects responsibility by way of establishing a very polarized power relationship between boss and subordinate, to where those words do not sound at all out of place. It is Bad Agile in spades.[1]

This sort of power relationship makes a lot of very important conversations that need to take place within a software project much more difficult and less likely. These aren't the conversations to do with culling or amending the feature set. They are the conversations to do with trade-offs based on the same feature set; they are matters to which the developers, and not the management, have the most knowledge and insight. But they can't happen when people believe that important decisions happen only certain places within an organization.

It was brought up elsewhere in this thread by patio11, and so I'll take a bit of latitude to say now that Japanese salaryman culture, and for that matter the bad facsimile of salaryman culture that American corporations seem to have adopted, is an extremely toxic environment for getting software written -- neverminding all the other things it is extremely toxic. It is a culture built on defensiveness and evasion of even the faintest whiff of responsibility for anything that requires any sort of discretion.

I think that it is this culture that is the fundamental problem, and that we keep trying to cure the disease by treating the symptoms. Salaryman culture doesn't even work perfectly for manufacturing, where there is literally no discretion amongst the rank-and-file. Things still go badly: the car still has brakes that fail, the toy still contains toxic amounts of lead, the plant still leaked toxins into the river nearby. How the hell do we expect it to work for something as obviously based on almost continuous acts of discretion like software development? This culture is broken, and we need to stop tacitly accepting that brokenness is inevitable and perpetual.

Or have we just decided the cultural battle is lost, and that we have to settle with whatever symbolic victories we can get to get through the day?

[1] The idea of Bad Agile is discussed more here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html

msie• 16 years ago

This is destined to be a classic. Well written and so true. It's a better version of the tale I tell my friends about my line of work.

I wonder if forwarding it to my non-coding partner will make any difference?

johnfn• 16 years ago

This was a pretty funny story. I was kind of disappointed that it never got into the area that I was really interested, though: that of writing clean, maintainable, "good" code.

milesf• 16 years ago

All coders should be schooled in the arts of negotiation. Sustainable pace is the only environment I will work in.

If a boss or customer is pushing for a new feature, the answer is to cut something else. Just because they want it doesn't mean they must have it. "But I might lose my job! But they might think I'm an amateur! But they... but...". No. Sustainable pace means working reasonably. Yes, there will always be others willing to say yes to everything and work insane hours. And they will continue to write crap code.

You've heard the old adage "Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two". Mine is "Good, fast, or cheap. Pick one, and it better be Good".

lindvall• 16 years ago

It's a shame he got himself into this situation.

I think more people need to realize that if you can only win a project by killing yourself, it isn't worth winning. So what if it means someone else gets the gig — it wouldn't have been worth it if that's what it took.

Also, if think copying-and-pasting code and forgoing defining constants are tricks that will save you time, You're Doing It Wrong.

binaryfinery• 16 years ago

He made his bed.

praptak3• 16 years ago

Haha, it is so funny when it happens to other people.

st0p• 16 years ago

With all due respect, I think he failed horribly. How can you accept a project due in two weeks, and then afterwards learn about the basic requirements? If you're so obsessed with 'clean code' (a concept i doubt if it even exists), how can you miss out on software engineering basics like requirements gathering?

gaius2• 16 years ago

Because most of the people who buy (anything) are not professional (anything) buyers.

I've shot a few weddings and to make a viable business out of it and do quality work, you need to charge about a grand per wedding. Probably more, depending on various factors. Really, that's just how the numbers work out. One reason the wedding photography business is so tough is that the people who buy your services have no idea what's involved (all told, it's 30-40 hours work, once you have your workflow down, using fairly expensive equipment) and balk at even half that. Esp. since their friend with his first "prosumer" camera has told them he can do it for a tenth of that[1], and they're being ripped off.

So the question really is, how much do you need the work?

[1] He can't; he is in fact committing himself to giving the happy couple those 30-40 hours of his time as a wedding present. But he won't know that 'til it's too late...

fauigerzigerk• 16 years ago

Please tell me where those software engineering basics are written down. I'd really like to learn how to deal with clients that come up with new requirements along the way on a two week project with a hard deadline. That's not an engineering problem I'm afraid.

jsn• 16 years ago

The question is, was it worth it? Did he get paid enough to feel well compensated for his frustration? If yes, then why all the venting? And if the answer is no:

You should always be ready to walk away from the deal. You don't have to accept unrealistic deadlines. If you choose to accept them, though, you don't have to allow massive spec changes midway. If you choose to allow it, you better make sure the money is good enough to compensate you for the massive horrible burnout you're going to put yourself through. And if you don't -- well, who else is to blame here? When you take a lot of risks, you get burned sooner or later. Don't make bets if you can't afford to lose them.

gaius2• 16 years ago

The Clients Never Care As Much As You Do

A valuable lesson indeed. Things to remember: 1) your client isn't spending their own money 2) if it goes well, they get the credit 3) if it fails, you take the blame.

Point (4) that I learned in the consulting business is, it's nothing personal. Part of your fee covers "scapegoat for hire". You're just an actor playing a role. You'll never run into those guys again, and it has no bearing on you getting work from that organization in the future.

defdac• 16 years ago

My code is only good until someone rewrites it and makes it better. I can make my code easy to read and follow and do what it is supposed to do, and thus easy to rewrite. That is good code.

Good code is definitely not something intricately made by some Golden Design Pattern Rule argumented by a wise ass for hours just because he or she thinks his way/code is the best. That will on the contrary, and with high certainty, result in really crappy code.

Programming is not science, it's more like art - with one big difference. Code can be written to be easy to modify by other artists afterwards to their liking. If these artists can't modify or read other peoples code, but have to rewrite it completely there is a really big probability their new code is that of a newbie. It might be fancy and intricate, but still made by someone that lacks the ability to read, follow and understand old code.

Someone that can't understand "crappy" code, probably have a hard time even understanding design patterns - and have probably spent alot of time studying design patterns and memorized all their fancy names..

brown9-2• 16 years ago

I spent those eight days writing code in a fury. I used all the tools available to me to get it done: copy-and-paste (AKA re-usable code), magic numbers (avoiding the duplication of defining constants and then, gasp!, retyping them), and absolutely NO unit tests! (Who needs red bars at a time like this, it’d just demotivate me!)

I don't understand why any of these are time-savers. Each of these tasks are things that might take you a few extra minutes now, but generally save far greater amounts of time almost immediately.

The example used in this article to come to the conclusion that "good code is impossible" is quite contrived. Of course you are going to end up with a shitty application and experience when you are 1) given almost no time to produce 2) given no technical help by the client 3) given no support by the client.

ido4• 16 years ago

I think it was meant in jest.

terra_t• 16 years ago

Friends don't let friends work in job shops.

The fundamental problems aren't about code, they're in project management. Job shops occasionally strike a good balance, but inevitably bad clients drive out the good clients.

From time to time I think about a business model that works a lot like a job shop but tries to build equity in a software product line, learning from experience, continuous improvement, all that... But then I look at my 'sunk costs' and how I can get them back quickly to pay for my vision and I see the need for a 'moon shot' that maximizes the revenue I can get in the medium term... That's life, I guess.

damoncali• 16 years ago

Three words: Out Of Scope

Cabal• 16 years ago

What kind of professional accepts a contract without a clearly defined scope of work? The author repeatedly talks about quality work, but I'm not sure he knows what that means. It sounds like the Big Company had a sucker on their hands, and they knew it.

Is Good Code Impossible?

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