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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

Quality is not rewarded at most companies, it's not going to turn into more money, it might turn into less work later, but in all likelihood, the author won't be around to reap the benefits of less work later because they will have moved onto another company.

On the contrary, since more effort doesn't yield more money, but less effort can yield the same money, the strategy is to contract the time spent on work to the smallest amount, LLMs are currently the best way to do that.

I don't see why this has to be framed as a bad thing. Why should anyone care about the quality of software that they don't use? If you wouldn't work on it unless you were paid to, and you can leave if and when it becomes a problem, then why spend mental energy writing even a single line?

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Because nothing can beat productivity of a motivated team building code that they are proud of. The mental energy spent becomes the highest reward. As for profit, it _compounds_ as for every other business.

The fact that this is lost as a common knowledge whereas shiny examples arises regularly is very telling.

But it is not liked in business because reproducing it requires competence in the industry, and finance deep pockets don’t believe in competence anymore.

I find doing my job as best as I can intrinsically rewarding. Even tho I am getting paid peanuts and have to give more than half of those peanuts to my government. I'm that kind of sucker.

Not everything is about money. Have you never wanted to be good at something because you enjoy it? Or do something for the love of the craft? Have you heard of altruism?

But why do that for the company instead of yourself?

This exactly. You have to be honest about why you are building something. If the answer is that you actually want to use it, then yes, quality and maintainability are important. It might even be a good idea to use no AI whatsoever.

But if you are building it because doing so is in the long chain of cause and effect that leads to you being fed and having shelter, then you should minimize the amount of your time that is required to produce that end result. Do you get better food, and better shelter if the software is better? It would certainly be nice if that was the case, but it's not.

> Not everything is about money.

Except for your job, which is primarily about money. Making it take less time, means that you have more time to focus on things that really are not about money.

Most people spend maybe 1/4 of their working age life at a job working for someone else. Why would you deliberately sabotage that by checking out mentally and waste all that time on sub-standard work? How do you expect to earn a promotion? You can produce good code at work and even better code at home for yourself. Deliberately producing slop at work will not help anyone.

By investing in quality on your job, your job will be easier and take less time. In software, you won't be called in to resolve that incident over the Thanksgiving weekend, and you won't be asked to debug why your system broke after someone committed 10k line diff without any review and without tests.

Be selfish! But be smart! On top of getting the best result for you, this gets the best result for the business too! And businesses know it, and even if they don't reward it proportionally, they do reward it with bonuses and seniority promotions.

Speaking only for my particular circumstances, the company is the vehicle that I use to do it for myself since it provides specialized facilities and equipment I wouldn't have access to as an individual or a founder. That I get paid for it is merely icing on the cake.

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