Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This perspective makes total sense if you never have to write code that is maintained by someone else or deal with code that some else has written.

All of our abstractions make sense to us. We wouldn’t have written them otherwise. But unless we are gods at documentation passing that context off to someone else is hard. It’s very easy to casually dismiss a bunch of code as over engineered by also casually dismissing requirements. By being extremely diligent about what you introduce in terms of code you will save yourself and other engineers hundred of hours down the line (if not thousands)

That being said, if you’re a startup who won’t survive without working code and your end users don’t ever see the code you write, who the fuck cares about the 10,000 lines of code you write that would take some other engineer half a month to understand? 10,000 lines of code that make money are worth infinitely more than 10 elegant ones that don’t




That makes complete sense. The team aspect is probably where our experiences differ the most.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: