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Comment by technix32 | Hacker News Reader

This is a complete fallacy IMO. The time is 10 fold down the line when people are attempting to reverse engineer in order to maintain it.

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Presumably, down the road, you'll either be a defunct company or doing well enough to afford 10 times the manpower to fix things.

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.

> Presumably, down the road, you'll either be a defunct company or doing well enough to afford 10 times the manpower to fix things.

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?

Notably, MySpace is often cited as a company that failed because their codebase was terrible, which prevented them from adding features as quickly as Facebook could (despite having many more engineers at the time.)

I don't believe that for one second considering the hacks that Facebook has had to do around the limitations of PHP.

I'm completely opposed to the view that bad craftsmanship is acceptable because of time constraints. You are paying for it very dearly, very soon. It is of the utmost importance to write the best code you can from the beginning, and I don't believe it slows you down very much, if at all.

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.

Both you and this comment's parent are correct. Which doesn't say anything about the nature of software engineering or project management, but more the importance of taking context into account when considering advice.

In this case, the evidence is that excel/word etc are doing fairly well...

LOL.

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.

Try telling that to a pointy-haired boss.

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