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

[Roland Swingler]

> the more experienced you get, the more likely you are to hate the
codebase you have to work on.

Not necessarily, due to the first point in your trollnalysis :). 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...



On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Patrick Gleeson <patrick at gojimo.co.uk>
wrote:

> 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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