I was reading Jeff Atwood’s latest post, Programming: Love it or Leave it when I came across this part, emphasis mine. Joel implied that good programmers love programming so much they’d do it for no pay at all. I won’t go quite that far, but I will note that the best programmers I’ve known have all had a lifelong passion for what they do. There's no way a minor economic blip would ever convince them they should do anything else. No way. No how. Unlike Jeff, I will go that far. I love to...
Here’s the dirty little secret about being a software developer. No matter how good the code you write is, it’s crap to another developer. It doesn’t matter if the code is so clean you could eat sushi off of it. Doesn’t matter if both John Carmack and Linus Torvalds bow down in respect every time the code is shown on the screen. Some developer out there will call it crap, and it’s usually the developer who inherits the code when you leave. The reasons are many and petty: Your code uses string concatenation in that one method rather than...