zlacker

>>jinhku+(OP)
First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers.

LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.

>>monero+M9
I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value. You won’t see it right away which is probably where this sentiment is coming from, but it will absolutely catch up to you.

Elegant code isn’t just for looks. It’s code that can still adapt weeks, months, years after it has shipped and created “business value”.

>>WD-42+7f
> I keep hearing this but I don’t understand. If inelegant code means more bugs that are harder to fix later, that translates into negative business value.

That's a rather short-sighted opinion. Ask yourself how "inelegant code" find it's way into a codebase, even with working code review processes.

The answer more often than not is what's typically referred to as tech debt driven development. Meaning, sometimes a hacky solution with glaring failure modes left unaddressed is all it takes to deliver a major feature in a short development cycle. Once the feature is out, it becomes less pressing to pay off that tech debt because the risk was already assumed and the business value was already created.

Later you stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution. Is that bug negative business value?

>>lockni+Ph
You not only stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution that takes engineering weeks to debug, but your interfaces are fragile so feature velocity drops (bugs reproduce and unless you address reproduction rate you end up fixing bugs only) and things are so tightly coupled that every two line change is now multi-week rewrite.

Look at e.g. facebook. That site has not shipped a feature in years and every time they ship something it takes years to make it stable again. A year or so ago facebook recognized that decades of fighting abuse led them nowhere and instead of fixing the technical side they just modified policies to openly allow fake accounts :D Facebook is 99% moltbook bot-to-bot trafic at this point and they cannot do anything about it. Ironically, this is a good argument against code quality: if you manage to become large enough to become a monopoly, you can afford to fix tech debt later. In reality, there is one unicorn for every ten thousand of startups that crumbled under their own technical debt.

>>friend+Xk
> You not only stumble upon a weird bug in your hacky solution that takes engineering weeks to debug, but your interfaces are fragile so feature velocity drops (bugs reproduce and unless you address reproduction rate you end up fixing bugs only) and things are so tightly coupled that every two line change is now multi-week rewrite.

I don't think you fully grasp the issue you're discussing. Things don't happen in a vacuum, and your hypothetical "fragile interfaces" that you frame as being a problem are more often than not a lauded solution to quickly deliver a major feature.

The calling card of junior developers is looking at a project and complaining it's shit. Competent engineers understand tradeoffs and the importance of creating and managing technical debt.

>>lockni+UC
This has always been true. I just don’t see how AI makes accumulating tech debt more attractive, as the original poster seems to be implying. If anything it seems to make things worse. At least when you write shit code by hand you know it so you can remember to go back to it, keep it in mind as a potential source of bugs. But YOLO from AI and you probably have no idea.