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

Sleepyfox sleepyfox at gmail.com
Tue Sep 13 09:25:51 PDT 2016


Surely the more junior you are a) the more likely it is that you've
only seen one codebase, and hence are likely to rate it as 'normal',
and the more senior you are the more codebases you have seen that are
'bad'.

Notice that due to the terminology of the survey ('good', 'ok', 'bad'
rather than 'below average', 'average' and 'above average') it is
entirely possible that the majority of code bases are 'bad' but your
analysis seems to conflate 'bad' with 'below average' - and it's
highly likely (based upon my and others' experience) that the majority
of code bases are indeed 'bad'.

It is also likely that the more senior you are the more likely you are
to know about code quality in detail, and hence have a higher bar. The
more junior you are the less likely you are to have a good
understanding of code quality and therefore the less likely you are to
be able to spot problems.

My experience (as I am a self-selected 'senior') also leads me to
believe that the industry as a whole favours 'get it out the door
fast' over 'do it right first time', and hence the scales tip towards
'bad'.

My £0.02

@sleepyfox
--
P.S. I count 'junior' as being less than 10 years experience (i.e.
still an apprentice), Journeyman as 10+ and Senior as 'a good deal
more than 10 years' experience :-)

On 13 September 2016 at 17:09, Roland Swingler
<roland.swingler at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Or maybe experience makes you more cautious, more risk-averse, improves
>> your ability to spot problems early, …?
>
> Don't disagree with any of that.
>
> On the other hand, more experience may make you more tolerant of the work of
> others, accepting of the fact that work was done under constraints one may
> be unaware of and less likely to label something as 'bad'.
>
> In any case, all I was really suggesting is that I'm not sure you can draw
> the conclusion from this data that more experience == more likely to judge a
> codebase as bad, if you're also concluding that being labelled as a senior
> engineer does not necessarily equate to being experienced.
>
> R
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 4:53 PM, Tom Stuart <tom at codon.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 13 Sep 2016, at 16:47, Roland Swingler <roland.swingler at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> the more experienced you get, the more likely you are to hate the
>> >> codebase you have to work on.
>> > It may be the case that the more senior *you think you are*, the more
>> > harshly you will judge a codebase. It may be uncorrelated with actual
>> > experience...
>>
>> Or maybe experience makes you more cautious, more risk-averse, improves
>> your ability to spot problems early, …?
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