> I think the bigger problems is most programs are bad and alienated. Programming with everything nicely packaged and ready to be modified is like working with a clean workbench / shop. If you've never been in a clean one, cleaning seems like a chore, but if you have, working in a dirty one seems not only inefficient, but gross and undignified.
You hit the nail on the head here.
I've worked a bunch of different jobs since college.
I have worked in exactly one clean, mature codebase.
The difference to all the others I've been in was like night and day.
I think seeing even "acceptably decent" code is incredibly rare in our industry.
To be fair, that's probably in large part because producing acceptably decent code is prohibitively expensive for any new product, and once you've gotten a new product off the ground and producing value, you've set the cultural norm that crappy code is what we make here.
You hit the nail on the head here.
I've worked a bunch of different jobs since college.
I have worked in exactly one clean, mature codebase.
The difference to all the others I've been in was like night and day.
I think seeing even "acceptably decent" code is incredibly rare in our industry.
To be fair, that's probably in large part because producing acceptably decent code is prohibitively expensive for any new product, and once you've gotten a new product off the ground and producing value, you've set the cultural norm that crappy code is what we make here.