Stripe's take on software engineer efficiency made me angry

After a while, I can guess where bad code comes from. Code that is hastily written by someone experienced is very different than code assembled by the inexperienced and without good guidance. Feature creep also has an obvious quality. Trying to turn these things into simple metrics is very much a mistake.

Software creation (is it really 'engineering'?) lives in the penumbra between arts and science. This leaves it open to interpretations and conjectures from various points of view. The definitive assessment has yet to be made.

Great article. I totally agree, but I see alot of Stripe developers seem to forget that 99% of software is maintained in large companies and outside of their "startup" mindset where code doesn't always live that long

It says something about the state of software development in the 21st century that I thought it was pretty brave of the author to put his actual name to that. (And FWIW, I absolutely agree).

&gt; How many hours per week do you estimate developers at your company waste on maintenance (i.e. dealing with bad code &#x2F; errors, debugging, refactoring, modifying)?<p>The question above is mixing dealing with errors and debugging with refactoring and modifying. I think this is the heart of the issue. One can (and should) modify and refactor &quot;good&quot; code too.

After the landing page I didn&#x27;t even went ahead and read the report because I dismissed it as content marketing. You can see the entire thing is targeted at managers not at software engineers.