> Nonsense. Maintainability almost always matters.
The last three large corporations I worked for never cared about maintainability because the application or portal would only be in use for maybe a year or 18 months before a complete rewrite or total redesign.
All of the recent projects I've been on take the same approach. Get it stood up, make it look pretty and release it. Because agile development makes business owners believe it only takes a few days to build Rome now, maintainability is never a consideration on any of the projects I've been on. Even senior devs are saying, "It's pretty hacky to get this to work, but it works" is a common troupe on our teams. I agree maintainability should be important, but on the agile projects I've been on, nobody cares about it.
To some degree I think executives do it on purpose so they can create more work for themselves in the future. They can pick it apart, ask for a bigger budget, hire more devs and use some shiny new technology to build it over again. Rinse, repeat.
> The last three large corporations I worked for never cared about maintainability because the application or portal would only be in use for maybe a year or 18 months before a complete rewrite or total redesign.
The first significant web app that I wrote had a similar approach. I was a new developer, but I had a good idea and they hired a manager and a couple of other developers to flesh it out. No need to hire a senior dev, because it was just a POC. We weren't even part of IT, so anything we built would of course only be in use for a few months before IT would allocated "real" developers to rewrite it.
Four years after I left that job, I got a call one day that the site was down and they couldn't fix it. After ten minutes on the phone with a former colleague reading me the logs out loud while I read through an old copy of the code that I (thankfully) still had on an archived drive, it turns out that the LDAP server's address had changed. We updated that and it came back.
Out of curiosity, I had them run `uptime` on that box. It had been up for six years - the two years I was there, and the four since I'd left. Not only had the application continued to function and be used... the box it was running on hadn't been updated restarted since it was built. It hadn't gotten updates since I'd left either.
The point of this story is simple: there is no such thing as code where maintainability doesn't matter, because there is no such thing as "temporary" code. Code can get retired or refactored away, sure, but there is absolutely no way to tell ahead of time if any given code snippet falls into that category.
I'm honestly not sure. When I first started out, all the applications I used had been built five years prior. We made small tweaks and continued to use them because they just worked
Now? I think newer technologies come out faster and capture people's attention. They want to use the new shiny thing. I think the "business people" want to have a big budget project to get recognition within large orgs. I think developers want to use the latest and coolest stuff. I think people feel like we already live in a disposable culture, why would our sites and apps be any different? You combine all of these and suddenly the pressure and inertia not to move or rebuild or redesign regularly is too much to overcome.
I still remember going to a ReactJS class and the guy running it kept saying, "Don't get me wrong, BackboneJS is still a hell of a library and is still relevant and awesome to build stuff with BUT React does a few things better."
This is where we are. Huge financial investments, time and energy to get a 3-5% bump in efficiency? Doesn't make sense to me.
Nonsense. Maintainability almost always matters.
As the adage goes: code shouldn't merely work, it should clearly work.
> If you were to peel back the layers on all the major websites out there, I'm sure you'd find less than stellar code everywhere.
Indeed, but Sturgeon's Law shouldn't make us feel better.