Ask HN: Does anyone values code quality at all?
I've been a software engineer for 17 years now. Most of that time, I've worked for a large IT Consultancy, where I joined many many projects in Fortune 100 companies to build systems that either supported critical operation or where customer facing - like ATM, transactional security, etc. On those projects, software quality was mediocre at best, despise all my efforts. It just wasn't a priority to build good, maintanable software. Priority was either management - like have effective communication with the client and making good projections or achieving mad deadlines (because less time meant better prices meant more projects).
So, I spend most of my adult life frustrated with the status quo, fighting the current (and loosing) and hoping to someday find a better place to work. Recently, several opportunities in Big Tech started showing up, something that wasn't possible (or was ridiculously hard) before given that I live in a third world country. I took my time, crammed a lot for the tests, and got a job at one of those companies.
So here I am at my dream company, working on my first project, expecting to finally have a place where I can learn from people instead of teaching, where I can see how some of the best software in the world is built...
...only to find out that this is the pretty much the same as everywhere else I've been. Software is poorly designed, poorly documented, terribly maintained, suffering from code rot after years of patching functionality without care for best practices. Code is procedural (despite being written in an OO language), things aren't automated (CI/CD here is worse than my previous jobs), and people don't seem to care.
Is there a place where code quality is important?