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Comment by xKingfisher | Hacker News Reader

> Coding for others is not art.

It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs.

Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form.

A big part of that is knowing which situations are worth making a stand. Every you write code or leave feedback, your doing it for your team current and future.

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Nothing that you talked about pertains to art. Writing good code does not mean you're making art.

You shouldn't strive for internal consistency with yourself, you should strive for external consistency with the other developers in your team. If someone reads your code and immediately knows it was you, you probably aren't doing a good job.

And that's the difference. If you are doing a good job as a software engineer, no one should notice you. If you're making good art, everyone should see you. And that is the difference between devs who think they're good, and devs who are truly good.

Code can be art but not all code should or even could be art. Like there is just zero utility or elegance in formatting your bash script with pretty comments and some elegant data model if it’s just something you run to manually pull metrics from a staging environment or whatever.

I see code more like rocks, nails, planks, tape, shards of broken glass, and a pile of signs that say things like RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER. If you need to do something cool with that stuff you probably do need to create something that looks pretty interesting and elegant in spite of your choice in building materials. But sometimes you just need to take a NO TRESPASSING sign and tape it to a plank that you jam into a pile of rocks. Don’t need to find a hammer if you don’t use nails, only need it up for a day, just one of a hundred things on your plate to do something of bigger scope and impact - just make sure the rocks are big enough to keep the plank standing, leave and forget about it.

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