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I can assure you, when shit is broken in production and customers are knocking at the door threatening to cancel it is not a luxury to find out these types of things...let alone start untangling the web.


You can always leave if you're not happy. Parent's point is that without that 600 line bash script person, your company/job might not even exist.

I'll remind you that, for every failing 600 line bash script you debug, there are probably 20 others that are sitting there, just working.


Yes because those other 20 have been debugged...


He means that those customers wouldn't exist in the first place if it weren't for the messy code.


And window repair customers wouldn't exist if it weren't for broken windows! If Bastiat were alive, he'd have a field day with the computing industry and its Freakanomics-like underpinnings.


When things eventually break, its possible that those customers and more would leave also because of that same code.


Anything is possible. Better to focus on what is likely. Did you stop using google over any of their outages? Most people didn't. These things matter, but people in software overstate them.


Depends on what's on the line.

Software for automatic trading, dosing radiotherapy, controller for moonshot etc will have different requirements on correctness than ordering of search results.

Ignoring these things can have people killed/ruined and they have.




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