Ask HN: When Quality Doesn't Matter
I am tired of the reality of writing code. When I decided to become an engineer, I thought the whole thing would be about the work you do and the results you achieve. However, after working 2 years in the industry, I&#x27;ve realized it&#x27;s not about the work you produce but rather about relationships and simply showing that tasks are done. Nobody seems to care how the task is accomplished.<p>In the last month, I started writing really poor code, and everything has gotten better for me - better Jira efforts and performance metrics. But nobody knows how terrible the code I write is or how bad the existing codebase has become.<p>Another sad thing I&#x27;m really tired of is seeing mediocre engineers write subpar code and then easily become &#x27;senior&#x27; in startup companies. The code I&#x27;ve seen in my current company&#x27;s codebase is something I wouldn&#x27;t even submit for my college assignments. I don&#x27;t understand why this is happening, but I hate it. Coding was my hobby, the thing I liked most in my life, but now I&#x27;m starting to hate seeing or writing code.<p>I no longer think about design or clean code; I just try to finish the task. I think that&#x27;s enough for my company. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s the same everywhere, but I suspect the conditions are similar. Nobody cares about what they do - it&#x27;s just poor code and moving on. Then we have a term called &quot;technical debt.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not talking about premature optimization; sometimes we need to be fast. But this isn&#x27;t just about speed - it&#x27;s about consistently poor code quality.