So Dev

Culture of writing crappy code

It's take an end to end culture to create a environment that nurture
low quality constantly cranking out in Fortune 500 companies.  A lot of us experience the pain of working in such a culture, and a lot of us find it pretty powerless when facing such culture.  No wonder a lot of developers prefer putting their real talent on their side projects instead of the company they work with.

I said this because recently I got a message from my boss asking me to "change the way I communicate with email."  The reason is that, as a auditor of our enterprise software code base, I recently sent out an email complaining that some junior developer creating useless constructor just to cover up failed unit test.  Knowing that they were junior developers, I worried that they don't understand the severity of the problem.  So I used an analogy of putting unwashed dishes in drawer to illustrate how writing code just to keep the code compiling instead of solving the root problem is bad.  My boss' boss saw the email and went into panic mode claiming that what I did was "not very professional" when the developers are "not very professional."  His exact wording is " its one thing one you have a developer sitting in a room with you and another when they're in a different country, culture, etc"


I found that a irrational and almost racist comment.  When commenting on a wrong coding practice, there's no different between telling that someone "sitting in a room with you" and  someone "in a different country, culture, etc".  I am talking about C#, Constructor that does nothing, not about something subjective like beauty or which-one-is-true-faith.  If he has problem with my auditing, he should STOP me from making my comment REGARDLESS of whether the developer is "sitting in a room with you" or someone "in a different country, culture, etc".


Our current system is full of duck-taping code on the top of duck taping code, can't be unit tested, slow in performance, and caused a major revamp on the code.  I wonder if the attitude of how the management team constantly downplaying criticism on code quality contributes to the problem.

posted by Deecay @ 1:16 AM