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0xbadcafebeeyesterday at 4:42 PM1 replyview on HN

Actually it's more specific than that. A company pays you not just to "write code", not just to "write code that works", but to write code that works in the real world. Not on your laptop. Not in CI tests. Not on some staging environment. But in the real world. It may work fine in a theoretical environment, but deflate like a popped balloon in production. This code has no value to the business; they don't pay you to ship popped balloons.

Therefore you must verify it works as intended in the real world. This means not shipping code and hoping for the best, but checking that it actually does the right thing in production. And on top of that, you have to verify that it hasn't caused a regression in something else in production.

You could try to do that with tests, but tests aren't always feasible. Therefore it's important to design fail-safes into your code that ALERT YOU to unexpected or erroneous conditions. It needs to do more than just log an error to some logging system you never check - you must actually be notified of it, and you should consider it a flaw in your work, like a defective pair of Nikes on an assembly line. Some kind of plumbing must exist to take these error logs (or metrics, traces, whatever) and send it to you. Otherwise you end up producing a defective product, but never know it, because there's nothing in place to tell you its flaws.

Every single day I run into somebody's broken webapp or mobile app. Not only do the authors have no idea (either because they aren't notified of the errors, or don't care about them), there is no way for me to even e-mail the devs to tell them. I try to go through customer support, a chat agent, anything, and even they don't have a way to send in bug reports. They've insulated themselves from the knowledge of their own failures.


Replies

cynicalsecurityyesterday at 5:06 PM

It gets interesting when a company assigns 2 story points to a task that requires 6 minimum. No time for writing tests, barely any time to perform code reviews and QA. Also, next year the company tells you since we have AI now, all tickets must be done 2 times quicker.

Who popped this balloon? I know I need to change my employer, but it's not so easy. And I'm not sure another employer is going to be any better.

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