A few days ago, I made a comment about good developers knowing how to think of their work from the business’s perspective. One guy responded by saying his only job is to write code and he doesn’t care about anything else. I just can’t imagine coming to that perspective, even if I understand the desire to have minimal responsibility.
> One guy responded by saying his only job is to write code and he doesn’t care about anything else.
Which is such a weird perspective to me. The point of writing software for business is to solve a business problem. Maybe it's a function of working in small companies and/or roles that straddle code writing and business, but I have a hard time writing good code unless I know the business problem space.
It's also why I think I don't get too worked up in the language arguments. I've written code from VB5 to Java to Go to JS all which deliver immense business value. When I think about the best code I've ever written, I don't think about how pretty it was or even the language, but is it still in use 5-10-20 years later.
Code 'longevity' is influenced by many more factors than code quality; e.g. rate of business change, traffic changes, infrastructure dependencies, and the complexity of the surrounding system.
As a pathological counter example think about arcane obtuse code that people are afraid to modify.
That's a good point. I didn't really define what I meant by 'best'. In some cases the code was used, updated, etc... for many many years by people I knew. If people were too afraid to touch it when a bug was found, then definitely not good. But, if people had no need to touch it b/c it works, that's a good spot to be also.
I think it's a failure to separate work and hobby. A lot of — heck, maybe even most — developers get into it because they enjoy programming. That's entirely reasonable, but you have to accept that some compromise is going to be required of you in the working world. You can't just do whatever you want to because it's fun and get paid for it.
If you find yourself empathising with the author, you really only have two choices:
a) Quit, do something else for a living, enjoy your programming in your spare time
b) Suck it up
Even rock stars have to sit in meetings and do things they'd rather not, like hold press conferences, give interviews, etc.
At many big companies there is plenty of room for those types of people. They just need to be put in a role where their customer is another developer. They can see things from the developer perspective and can be plenty successful working on things that are not public facing.
