True - who can say ? Hard to argue with a WHOLE career that got "shit done" and WIDELY used by the world ?
Maybe THAT is the metric to focus on. The value of the code versus the quality ? I honestly don't know the answer ?
But I know how much of my "time and energy (as you get older you released the limiting step is your cognitive-energy not so much your actual wallclock-time) " I spent on "trying" todo code correctly which many times it means, the code doesn't get done and I end up frustrated by not shipping anything.
Working for a boss, the above used to upset me a bit. Now working for myself this REALLY upsets me and my 'income' :)
In these cases, I would DEF liked to have "Fabrice" getting shit-done-coding ability ? Again just my humble opinion :)
Maybe coding is like a marriage...
a) "You can be right or you can be happy :)"
Squinting hard enough:
b) "You can do things correctly or you can ship code in time that makes a difference ?"
I guess the "better" you are the closer the extremes are from "b". i.e IF you are the theoretical-best-coder-that-ever-lived there is should be no "distance/friction" between "coding correctly AND shipping on time code that has
an impact" ??
When I was young I wrote code so I could understand it. Everyone goes faster when the code looks like how they expect it to look. Some of these 10x people are really good, others have mental models that are alien, and so nobody else can touch their stuff because none of it makes a lick of sense to anybody else. These are 3x devs that make everyone else .3x devs.
Writing code for me made me indispensable, then it made me a bottleneck with a stream of uncomfortable distractions in the form of people queuing up for me to answer questions or fix bugs or implement features. It was exhausting, but I was happy enough. That is, until there was a cooler project I wasn’t allowed to transfer to because I was indispensable.
Figure out how to write code so other people can read it. Figure out how to write code so other people can modify it. It looks a bit like clean code, but sometimes isn’t. Occasionally it can be quite different.
