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Comment by Dlemlo | Hacker News Reader

I have seen so much production code with garbage code and massive bugs, the industry doesn't care for 'real'.

They care in principle, for the most part bad code makes changes and extensions slow to implement and causes unnecessary production issues which costs time and money. But there is always the tension between implementing something quickly now and being able to implement things quickly in the future and unfortunately the preference is almost always quickly now despite everyone knowing that this is the way more expensive choice in the long run.

It isn't necessarily the more expensive choice in the long run. Let's say that companies A and B are direct competitors who start from the same point. Company A quickly codes a bunch of buggy software and ships it in a month. Company B takes its time and ships good, clean, well-organized, mostly bug-free code in five months. Company A makes money. Company B goes out of business and its code is useless, its nice qualities irrelevant.

This is just a hypothetical example, I'm not saying that this is how it would necessarily go in all cases.

Not even in principle. Like how often you had to fight a product manager to do this or that.

"Does that code work?" "yes" "so lets ship it" "but its not good" "but it works right?"

But they also ask why the next feature is taking so long, because of the mess we created with the last feature, and I would consider this caring in principle. Unfortunately this almost always filed as unavoidable.

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