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Comment by phn | Hacker News Reader

Sloppy?! Those guys have needs the majority of us will never need to deal with. Did you read the presentation?

If anything they're the opposite of sloppy.

The parent is not referring to those needs (which are legitimate). The presentation talks a lot about the hacking culture; how there is a lot of duplicate code, a lot of dead code, a lot of "temporary" code.

We call these things technical debt. But it sounds like they just never fix them. Refactors never happen.

Eventually you just hear "New version of our app rewritten from the ground up" when it all becomes one big pile of technical debt.

I sincerely doubt the fact that there are companies which thoroughly fix "technical debt".

They don't call it debt. It is simply their way of keeping their agility with a huge number of developers. If the flip side is junk that mostly impacts install space, I don't see it as a bad trade-off.

What alternative way would you suggest to keep your mega team productive and shipping features?

You can't avoid fixing tech debt. Eventually it impedes your ability to be productive. It happens, to some degree, to every software project. Someone else joked about "we wrote the app from the ground up" but that really does happen. You're not "shipping features" if you're rewriting the app.

Hiring a team whose sole job description is garbage cleanup?

Productivity != Total Output.

1. Having a core team who's job it is to maintain the app and clean up the debt.

2. I seriously have to question that they absolutely need that pace. I don't buy it for a second that any of this is necessary or better than the alternative.

Their needs don't explain all the redundant and unused code. It's slop, plain and simple.

It's not. It's just decoupling. Redundant code exists because different groups of people needed the same thing in different contexts (with probably slightly different requirements), and co-ordinating to keep this stuff centralised is hard, and most of all time-consuming.

This has two clear advantages. You don't need to fill a form every time you change the smallest of functions and when you mess up, you don't impact everyone else. Honestly, I don't get the negativity.

EDIT: I don't mention dead code because that can be, if really needed, removed by a tool so I think the point is moot.

> I don't mention dead code because that can be, if really needed, removed by a tool so I think the point is moot.

It can easily be cleaned up in an automated fashion and they don't do it. That's exactly what everyone means by slop. If you could pick up the clothes on your floor but don't, it's not because you're a hacker.

Update: not only do they not clean it up, they ship this shit to a billion people. Talk about lazy.

If the were not sloppy they wouldn't have to deal with those needs too.

Because they wouldn't exist.

Their needs are because they're sloppy. Having an overarching Core team who's job is to maintain the app and guide the architecture would cut down on what they need immensely.

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