Frequently there are critical code sections where it is much easier to tell people "don't touch it" rather than training people how to work on it safely.
Getting it done > Getting it done properly as far a management is concerned.
Facebook was a spaghetti code mess in the beginning. I'm sure it caused them some growing pains, but moving too slowly early on would have likely been more costly.
Only in startup land which is still a small fraction of our industry.
Most places will never have 10 times the manpower to fix things and are hurting themselves by not doing them properly in the first place.
> Facebook was a spaghetti code mess in the beginning. I'm sure it caused them some growing pains, but moving too slowly early on would have likely been more costly.
Survivor-ship bias, for every facebook how many potentially viable companies never got off the ground because users couldn't tolerate using their steaming pile?
If you've ever seen a software product where something that should take a weekend takes months to get out, it's often not because the problem is more complicated than you'd think, but because of a mangled, complex codebase which prevents anyone from getting real work done.
Edit: Removed a bunch of redundancy.
The long as short of it as a contractor I have to get it done. It will be probably me making the changes later and I make sure I put these things called comments in.
Also developers pretending code quality is an either or proposition is a false dichotomy. You can write 80% of it in a correct manner and the other 20% could be just hacks to get it done in time. You can't write the perfect system.
So I am sorry you are the one being fallacious.
Coworker: "I hadn't enough time to do it right"
You: "Given enough time, how would you do it differently?"
Coworker: "............" (crickets)
IMHO it's not related to deadlines only ; the "not enough time" argument is often a comfortable fallacy, keeping us from facing the limits of our current skills.
I found it to be especially true with testing. I've lost the count of how many times I heard "we didn't had time to write (more) tests". But testing is hard. And when given enough time, these developers don't magically start doing it "right" overnight.
Bingo. It's not necessarily only skills though. It can be myriad reasons and "no time" is just the easiest excuse they can think of. In big companies I've often seen the company process prescribing such bad tools that a good TDD testing strategy is impossible to do with those tools, but they won't move away from them, because somebody in purchasing already bought 10,000 licenses for this bad tool (which is often just a bad GUI, which doesn't really help, except for selling the thing).
The worst tool was a bad GUI where you couldn't even define functions you want to use, that had slow (>1h), non-deterministic, test execution, for a unit test.
In C# this normally means using IOC + DI.
Also almost nobody I know does proper TDD. I know it is very convincing when one of the TDD evangelists shows you how to write something like a method to work out the nth number in a fibonacci sequence using nothing but just writing tests.
In reality most 95% of developers that even write tests write the logic and write the test afterwards to check the logic does what it should.
>In C# this normally means using IOC + DI.
I've become quite partial to functional programming in the last few years. Side effect free functions with functions as interfaces for DI lend themselves perfectly to TDD and data parallel async without worrying too much.
C# is now slowly taking over most of the good features from F#, but I think the culture won't transform so easily.
e.g.
I had to write a bespoke popup window launcher for a large gambling company in the UK. The games were mainly the awful slots games that you see in motorway service stations. These are basically one arm bandits on steroids.
There is a lot of logic that was in JavaScript that should have been in C# and I had to design it correctly to work with a third party Proprietary CMS system and I had to manage session tokens on 3 to 4 third party systems. Not easy.
It took me about 2 weeks of just reading the code and absorbing it, drawing lots of diagrams of how data flowed through the system and then porting that logic over to C# in a way that would work with the CMS system in a logical and OOP fashion and handling auth tokens effectively.
If anyone feels that there is enough time then (depending on the position dev/manager/client/etc) he starts slacking, moving focus, moving deadlines, moving staff, demanding more features/support/documentation or new requirements analysis, start being pissed more about smaller bugs.
Related to that is the "obvious performance fix" that doesn't perform faster that keeps burning up time for years long after it was proven to not be faster because freshers never found out about it and the oldsters forgot.
But also unlike your coworker, I probably _figured out how to do it right_ in the time given. It's pretty rare that I don't have time to do it right; it does happen (especially with extreme instances of scope creep and requirements drift), but it's rare.
Which I guess is your point? The time excuse is just an excuse, and a good developer writes good code.
For example, code running in JVMs on top of non deterministic operating systems sometimes behaves in really odd ways. Sometimes a main loop is stable for reasons nobody understands.