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Discussion on: Empathy in Dev and Ops

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

This point: "The dev/engineer was doing the best they knew how."
It's both realistic and a problem.

Let's assume first the person who wrote the code is a competent junior programmer at least (which as others have pointed out is not always the case). Even given that there is a massive gap in experience in knowledge between that person and a seasoned expert, and even moreso with the top programmer types.

It's often hard, from these positions of experience, to look at noob code and not cringe. Even if the code is correct it just wouldn't be the way they did it. It's not wrong per-se, but it's so far from their ideal solution as to be indistinguishable from wrong. This can apply to the structure of the code itself or the concepts and architecture behind it.

As to legacy code, it's sometimes okay to place blame. Occassionally it's good to callout people on their questionable coding practices, even those from the past. Assigning blame doesn't resolve the current issue, but it sometimes can prevent future issues.