Some drama for the weekend.
So,
I was working on many custom coded websites, CMS, other things in this biz. Many of these things was looking really great from front-end interface and functionality. Everything was great, until I was looking into the sources...
Most, something like 95% of the code I have to work on, is written in totally non-professional way. Complete lack of structure organization, total mess, totally nonsense code. Seeing classes in the code is a big rarity, and when I see one, it's totally not considered. I never seen even simple inheritance. About things like design patterns I can only dream. People seems to don't know anything about data encapsulation. The same code is repeating in multiple files, it's just copy-pasted. Commenting code seems to be difficult too for many programmers. Last time I was working on one project, something like 4000 lines of code. How many comments? Not more than 50.
It happens even in big products, widely used in industry. I don't want to say names, but I was working on one big tube script, used on high traffic tubes. It was written completely in procedural style, no single class was spot. What the hell, we are still in 20th century? Object oriented programming was available from PHP4. We have now PHP5/5.3 with greatly improved OOP, but people are still coding in procedural way.
I often work on code that previous coder abandoned ("my previous programmer disappeared" situation). In my theory, their projects are just getting beyond them. Their lack of programming skills and/or lack of planning skills are making the project more and more difficult to further development.
Why you people are hiring such amateurs? Because they are cheap? It will not save your money. Maybe at the beginning you save a few hundreds dollars, but later you will have to pay thousands when the original programmer disappear, because the code will be too difficult to further development.
Also, I was wondering why there are so many amateur programmers. Some people are coding a good software, but it totally sucks from technical view. It is really so hard to buy a few books, learn about object oriented programming, software designing, design patterns, software engineering? It is really so hard, or people are really just so stupid?
I was working in past in mainstream company. The code had to be well documented, written using design patterns, well planned, the team had to use agile methods, use unit tests, make case studies, we was using UML to visualize things.
I moved here and here I earn a lot more money that in this company and other mainstream companies. But quality of the code here is a few times more worst. WTF?
For the end, some related humor:
