Have you ever worked on a code that should have taken hours to compete and you took days to complete it. Have you seen what should have been a one-line change but that change impacts many modules and hundred of lines have to be changed to achieve that.
Why do you think that happens ? is this because of bad code? I am sure at first you might of taken care of writing good code and what happened to that good code? what contributed you writing bad code
Many of us might complain its because of change in requirements, or tight schedules to do the things right. But I believe its because of us the developers. developers should take blame for this rotten code, NOT the managers or customers.
its our responsibility to tell our managers that “hey this code is shit, we need to refactor it first before we do any changes to it”, when your manager says finish this at any cost.and believe me most of the time your manager would listen to you, even they are obsessing about the schedule.
to drive this point, consider what if you are a doctor and had a patient who demanded that you stop all the silly hand washing in the preparation of surgery because its taking too much of his time . would you listen to him? since he is the boss!. it would have been unprofessional(rather a crime!) if you would have listened to him.
So too its unprofessional for programmers to bend to the will of Managers who don’t understand the risks of making a mess.
All the developers with more than few years of experience know that bad code slows you down,and yet we choose to make messes in order to meet deadline.
True Professionals do not make a mess of a code in order to meet a deadline. They know that the mess will slow them down eventually and will miss them to miss the deadline. So they know out of their experience that – the only way to go fast – is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.
learnbycode 