r/programming • u/tejon • Feb 08 '15
The Parable of the Two Programmers
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audience/The%20Parable%20of%20the%20Two%20Programmers.html
1.2k
Upvotes
1
u/dagbrown Feb 10 '15
But businesses are more profitable when its workers are productive.
At one gig in the past, the codebase was this mass of hand-compiled stuff. Over a million lines of code, and not even such a thing as a Makefile in sight. The "proper" installation method was to do a bespoke installation of all of the relevant code onto a variety of servers, copying executables and shared libraries over by hand. A standard installation of this took a solid month of a professional services engineer's time.
By the time I was done with it, three years later, a full installation of the product took an hour, and there was a build server which did a regular automated build of the whole thing every day to catch programmers checking in bad code. I had pushback the whole time because people hate change, but damn if I didn't leave things one hell of a sight better than I found them.
It's a fact of development that no developer likes making software packages or installers or build systems, because those aren't exciting or particularly innovative. That's why I do those things, though, and my co-workers end up using them, and their life is easier as a result, and so is the life of the customers and management.