“You can read the code”

.. is very, very important in the context of milliseconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years. And decades.

Today, you might say that John/Fabrice’ code is readable/unreadable, but will that also be true in 5 years time, in a different cultural/technological era?

Obviously yes in the case of these individuals - because the ecosystem their products have created is self-sustaining at a mass (consumer/social) level.

I’ve built software which has shipped and effected the lives of millions, too. Many of us have.

But I have not built a massive ecosystem by working on the right software which was adopted by millions of developers who read my code, was inspired by it, and used it for something in their own products - thus creating sub-ecosystems upon sub-ecosystems, a big sprawling tree of economy which spreads out into the mass of humanity who use technology.

In this story we have two cases of individuals who have accomplished an extraordinary reach of software, in their own uniquely flavored ways - and this demonstrates that there are no absolute requirements to strip personality from the code - as long as its damn good code in the first place.

>filter candidates out of companies

It’s a great way to decide not to work at a company which managers do not understand the importance of architecture at various scales, milliseconds, seconds, hours, days, weeks ..