Comment by tikhonj
9 months ago
I disagree entirely. Design is fundamentally a human-oriented discipline, and humans work almost exclusively with code before it is compiled. A strong shared mental model for whatever we're doing is as much a part of software development as any code that runs on a computer.
Programming languages can (should!) be amazing tools for thought rather than just tools for making computers do things; using these tools to figure out what we're doing is a critical part of effective development. The highest-leverage software engineering work I've seen has involved figuring out better ways of thinking about things: developing better tools and abstractions. Tools and abstractions compound since they fundamentally impact everything built on top of them. A good high-level design is the difference between a team that can add some specific capability in a day, a team that would take six months and a team that would say it cannot be done.
I agree, I recently keep having the thought that by far the hard part of programming is code organisation. Whether that's where the files go, or how you've wrapped up commonly used idioms like validation or data access in easy to use abstractions.
It's so easy to get it spectacularly wrong and end up in a mess.
And it's seems so deceptively pointless at the start. It's easy to throw together a greenfield project and get something working, but make a complete mess of organisation. But then it becomes so expensive so quickly to then make changes to that code.
I've joined quite a few projects after 1/2 years of someone else making the project. And so often it's such an imposing mass of code that basically does sod all. Bad architects who don't understand why they're even using the patterns they are or mid/junior-level coders making projects is basically a recipe for the project just grinding to a halt just when it looks like you're getting near the end.
It's when 1,000s of lines are easily refactored to 100s that you start thinking, how can these people honestly believe they have the ability to lead a project? They are so clearly completely out of their depth it's depressing.
We seem, as an industry, to have a complete inability for management to distinguish genuine senior developers from people who will never be.