The original version of this book is something I'll always treasure. It sits next to "Code Complete", the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns" book and Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" on my top shelf and I still read parts of it every year.
I'd love to see more people pick them up.
So I’ve become extremely nihilistic about software development. It isn’t that I don’t think the properties of clean code and software craftsmanship aren’t worth it, it’s that companies and the engineers who build them from startups don’t care and are focused on keeping their doors open. Long term health is a very secondary concern.
I’ve done my fair share of preaching that we should refactor and start focusing on quality during code reviews and it’s basically just shouted down with “don’t fix what isn’t broken” and YAGNI.
If you have an established, cashflow-positive company that's not hell-bent on scaling fast (or being forced to scale unnaturally by VC backers) then the balance swings back and it becomes worth investing in your codebase.
> Code quality is really not important at all as long as the product works and is bug free
According to Robert C. Martin is not possible to move fast without good quality.
Of course scaling to billions of users only proves that it can be done without quality, not that they could have done it better with quality software.
The way I look at it is the following:
There are times to take the shortcut (Business reason, for example), and there are times to do the technically sound thing (long term health, usually).
A healthy software team is doing both as it makes sense. That's quality software dev. It's when business takes over the software teams decisions and you always take the shortcut that quality falls off a cliff.
I've worked in those environments too much. I want to be able to take pride in the work I do.