[LRUG] Code quality 2.5-question survey: the results

[Patrick Gleeson]

Thanks to everyone who participated! There were 66 responses, of whom 52
self-identified as senior, 13 as middleweight and one as junior.

6% of respondents said the last codebase they inherited was good, 55% said
ok, and 39% inherited something bad. Looking at just senior developers,
only 4% said good, 52% said ok, and 44% said bad.

Brief bit of trollnalysis:

First of all, assuming (unfairly), that LRUG respondents are representative
of the industry as a whole, it's clear that job title inflation has run
amok. Faced with a severe shortage of Ruby developers, employers will add
pretty much any adjective to a prospective candidate's offer title to get
them to come on board. Anecdotal evidence supports this: I can barely find
the # key on my laptop, and yet my email signature still gets to have
"Senior" in it. When all those graduates of General Assembly and Makers
Academy start flooding the market, a bunch of us are going to have to up
our game, because the word "Senior" will no longer be handed out like candy
to anyone with over a year's experience.

Continuing to assume (still unfairly) that the results are representative
of the industry, we Ruby developers are clearly both grumpy and
hypocritical. If *most* codebases are at best ok, then that applies to our
own code as well as the code we judge. The fact that the more senior you
get the more you dislike other people's code suggests that in fact code
"quality" is merely a measure of how well other people's code conforms to
your own personal preferences, which get more idiosyncratic over time. It's
telling that complaints about code were broadly split between the "too
complicated for what it needed to achieve" camp and the "too simplistic for
what it needed to achieve" camp - are those really objective judgements
about the code itself, or just subjective expressions of preferred style?

Depressing conclusion: the more experienced you get, the more likely you
are to hate the codebase you have to work on. No matter who you are, you
probably won't think the next codebase you inherit is good. And the next
person will probably think the same about the code they inherit from you.
In short: coding sucks. Let's all set up artisanal coffee shops.

-- 

*Patrick Gleeson*

Senior Ruby Developer

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