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

[Najaf Ali]

Concur on all points. Bravo!
Najaf Ali - Founder atHappy Bear SoftwarePhone: 07590 073 977Skype: alinajaf85
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I run a technical consultancy specialising in Ruby on Rails. Have a look atthis
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we would appreciate being put in touch :-)
 





On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 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

Gojimo is available oniOS,Android (beta) andweb (beta)

EducationApps Ltd is a registered company in England, No. 07556427

Gojimo, c/o Edspace, Block D Room 203, Hackney Community College, London N1 6HQ
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