Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I had the fortune to work at an agency that cared a whole lot, and tended to take on clients who had learned hard lessons from bad code written for the platform we worked in.

Code quality matters and has tangible consequences in that niche, and it was awesome to work in that environment.

I haven't worked anywhere like that previously, and I think the key factors that brought code quality to the forefront were:

* Bugs cost sales

* Poor code caused friction for features a significant amount (reduced ROI)

* Small teams and an insanely tight customer relationship to those teams. The client needed to have a stakeholder in our team or as close to that as possible.

But most importantly it was just the company culture from top to bottom. The director cared, he made the project managers care, and we already cared because it's more fun to write good code.

That's a nice place to work in! How was this company doing? Would it be doing better just shipping "if it makes money - it's good enough" code?

It really was! I believe they were doing well, growing at a steady pace. Another part of the puzzle was that client relationships were long, over years, so if we wrote bad code it was us that would have to deal with it later. The clients were typically larger, which helped to that end.

We did take on a rushed project at one point, so there is a good comparison in that project. It shipped, but everyone was unhappy, some key people left and had to be re-hired for. It triggered a very transparent discussion roughly titled "let's figure out how to never do that again" and to that end they curated the clients more carefully, and put in some checks to see if projects are a good fit.

But I understand that is probably unique, and at previous jobs the "good enough to make money" mantra has worked out okay.

I think when your software domain is complex and rapid, it pays to have sound architecture. When it is simple, or slow to change, it doesn't matter quite as much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com