Steve Bennett wrote:
On 2/10/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The cynical side of my says that is more to do
with people wanting job
security. Mind you I have the same view about much of copyright law.
Eh, no. If you want job security you redesign everything you can get
your paws on, so you're the only one who understands how everything
works. Leaving things alone makes you replaceable.
Yeah, you're right, it's just fear. Fear and laziness.
The few programmers I've met who are both entirely cynical about their
work and socially adept enough to be manipulative don't seem to want to
code their way into a lifetime of bug fixes. Instead, they'll become
evil managers or jealous guardians of key knowledge. But they won't
intentionally make a mess.
Interestingly, and bringing this almost back on topic, it's our own Ward
Cunningham who gave me my best tool in fighting that death-by-cruft
pattern: the concept of code debt.
The people paying the bills don't care much about abstract notions of
quality, especially the sort of mysterious under-the-hood quality that
they can't see. But if you talk about programmers building up debt, and
the interest you pay in having to touch high-debt code, they start to
get it. And then when you tell them that if the total debt ever rises
above the value of the code, that's when you have to declare project
bankruptcy and start from scratch, that really makes their eyes light up.
Suddenly, instead of bad code being a vague problem for programmers to
deal with by working harder, it's a financial issue, a debt that is
getting in the way of something they want.
William