So, the /entire staff/ of my office (er.. all three of us), all seniorish ruby developers, were telling the boss’s brother at lunch the other day about just how little code we actually write. I mean, that’s our job, right? Writing code? I’d estimate I spend less than a day per week, cumulative, writing code. If I was paid by line of code I produce, I couldn’t afford to live in Indonesia, much less Seattle. What I get paid for is knowing /what/ code to write, and how to write it well. (Or, at least, how to recognize later how I wrote it poorly and fix it.) One of the single greatest things you can do as a developer is to get rid of wasteful code. A manager who makes a comment like that, in any context other than very obviously making a joke, should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. A developer new to a project who can cut 98% of a redundant block of logic and get the same results deserves a bonus. And possibly a license to hunt the person who wrote the original 600 lines for sport.Chain of notes attached to a ticket:
New programmer on the completion notes: “Reduced 600 lines of mostly redundant case statements to 15 tightly constructed lines.”
Her manager, in the management notes on the same ticket: “15 lines of code in 3 hours is not enough.”
I want to rage quit and I don’t even have this job
“Redacted 585 lines of redundant code. Hoping upper management can be as efficient in finding underperforming and superfluous content in its structure. HTH, HAND.”