> You don't have to pick on camp over the other. In my opinion, if you want to make a good product for a user, you should also treat the code you produce for them as your craft. There is no substitute for high quality work.

Exactly, thank you for putting it like that.

So far it’s been my observation that it’s only the people who think like the OP who put the situation in the terms they did. It’s a false dichotomy which has become a talking point. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.

For an exaggerated, non-comparable example meant only to illustrate the power of such framing devices, one could say: “there are people who think guns should be regulated, and there are people who like freedom”. It puts the matter into an either/or situation. It’s a strategy to frame the conversation on one’s terms.

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doug_durham 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with OP's distinction. However just because you see software as a means to an ends, doesn't mean that you don't feel that quality and craft are unimportant. You can see the "craft" oriented folks as being obsessed with the form of their software. A "craft" oriented engineer might rewrite a perfectly functioning piece of software to make it what they perceive to be "easier to reason about". I consider most software rewrites to be borderline malpractice.

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deltaburnt 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the kind of surface level rewrites that people rag on are pretty rare, at least in my experience. Realistically code that's impossible to understand, underdocumented, and lacking in proper abstractions is also deficient code. If you've ensured that the code is "good enough", you will likely hit a bug or feature request that is hindered by the poor structure and understanding of the code.

It's totally fine to say "the code works, that area is stable, let's not mess with that code". I make those kinds of tradeoffs on a near daily basis. But let's be real, "perfectly functioning code" is an ill defined, moving target. What looks like perfectly functioning code to a sibling team or a PM, could be a massive liability to someone who actually knows the code.

But then again I'm writing OS and performance critical code. A 1 in 1 million bug is easier to ignore in a throwaway log viewer website.

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tikhonj 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The most productive teams I've seen (eg at Jane Street) rewrite things all the time, and still move faster than any "normal" teams I've seen. I remember when I interned there over a decade ago, they were already on like the seventh? version of their incremental computing framework, and were building a new build system. But they were also incredibly effective at getting things done both on a per-engineer basis and in terms of making money.

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jimbokun 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

With bad code it’s often almost impossible to improve the functionality or correctness or performance of the code, without first rewriting parts of it.

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bit-anarchist 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That example doesn't work well. All regulations come at the cost of freedom, and every freedom comes at the cost of regulations. While it isn't a strict binary (either 100% freedom or 100% regulation), enacting regulations do interfere with freedom. So this isn't just framing, it demonstrates a relationship between the two concepts, which may become relevant down in the discussion, if it already hasn't.

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layer8 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Regulation can cause freedom to be balanced differently between parties. For example, regulating smartphone manufacturers can result in more freedom for users. It’s not true that regulation necessarily reduces freedom overall (to the extent that that can even be graded). Just like rights, freedoms aren’t absolute, and one’s freedom often impinges on someone else’s freedom.

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bit-anarchist 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The increase of freedom of the users is an indirect side effect, intentional or not, which, as you put it, can happen, or not. But a direct effect, which is guaranteed to happen, is the loss of freedom of the manufacturer. Whether that's a good thing, that's another topic.

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qotgalaxy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The increase of freedom of the slaves is an indirect side effect. But a direct effect, which is guaranteed to happen is the loss of freedom of the slaveholder.

	▲	bit-anarchist 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's certainly a perspective, specially given how slavery is often regulated into law. But I digress, as previously stated, there's a plentiful discussion to be had about the ethics and morality of freedom/regulations, but my point is how there is, in fact, a dichotomy between both and it isn't just framing. Which, in a sense, you just corroborated.