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Discussion on: Does refactoring Legacy Code pay off in your career?

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joro550 profile image
Mark Davies • Edited

Thanks for writing this

I feel I'm in a minority of developers when I say that I actually like maintaining software, I find it a good challenge - I always say that writing code is easy I could do that all day every day, understanding code and how/where it can change is difficult.

I always find it difficult to get any product managers interested.... From experience their the people who are pushing constant features, customer allready have feature X they won't care if we make the code cleaner. But developers will.

My advice for this is.... Don't cut any corners when implementing a feature.
It's so tempting to cut corners when implementing new features, you've got the product managers asking for dead lines, for you to cut corners to save time, managers saying that expect work faster. But you have to push back saying that you are doing professional best - there is a great chapter about interacting with people in "The Clean Coder" book that says that developers are the advocates and the sole owners of code, only they know how painful it is to work with the code the've created, so it is on them to push back PO and manager requests to do things "quick and dirty".

One thing I will say is: NOTHING IS EVER A QUICK WIN. Imagine everything you write will have to be maintained for 10+ years. Or as an old lecturer of mine said Imagine eevry developer that works with your code knows where you live.

NEVER BELIEVE ANYONE when they say a Rewrite is coming, it isn't, this is your one and only chance of getting things right so do your professional best.

One last rant.
"The Way It Has Always Been Done™" - THIS. KILLS. ME.
This is such a cicular argument in my experience, "We've always done it this way so we should continue doing it this way", everytime I hear it I die a little inside. It's basically like a developer saying "I don't want this codebase to grow".

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nicoespeon profile image
Nicolas Carlo

Thank YOU for sharing this. I totally align with what you say and share a lot of similar feelings =)

Take care and keep up your great maintaining work 👍