alt Hacker News>For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term
It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years. The correlation between high quality code and economic performance was not just non-existing, it was almost negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where engineering felt like a true priority, tech debt was well managed, principles followed, that place was not making any money.
I am not saying that this is a general rule, of course there are many places that perform well and have solid engineering. But what I am saying is that this short-sighted management might not be acting as irrationally as we prefer to think.
I generally agree; for most organizations the product is the value and as long as the product gives some semblance of functionality, improving along any technical axis is a cost. Organizations that spend too much on engineering principles usually aren’t as successful since the investment just isn’t worth it.
But, I have definitely seen failure due to persistent technical mistakes, as well, especially when combined with human factors. There’s a particularly deep spiral that comes from “our technical leadership made poor choices or left, we don’t know what to invest in strategically so we keep spending money on attempted refactors, reorgs, or rewrites that don’t add more value, and now nobody can fix or maintain the core product and customers are noticing;” I think that at least two companies I’ve worked at have had this spiral materially affect their stock price.
I think that generative coding can both help and hurt along this axis, but by and large I have not seen LLMs be promising at this kind of executive function (ie - “our aging codebase is getting hard to maintain, what do we need to do to ensure that it doesn’t erode our ability to compete”).