Comment by sfn42
2 months ago
I really can't imagine this ever becoming a real problem. Not once have I ever worked in a place where any kind of leadership would ever give a shit about comments nor anything else in the code itself. The lowest level leadership has ever gone is click a button to see if it works.
And if anyone has a problem with comments existing it's trivial to find/replace them out of existence. Literally a one minute job, if you actually think the codebase would be better without them.
This is such a humongous non-issue it's crazy man.
Leadership doesn't need to give a shit about the code to cause the cultural defect that leads to comments not being maintained. All they need to do is set the conditions which prevent code owners from having the agency to reject shoddy work. In my experience this always happens. It can manifest as either:
(1) "flat" organization where everyone owns everything and therefore nobody has the authority to reject a PR
or (2) "rubber stamp" culture where people who reject shoddy work are "not a team player" and therefore performance defective.
So far every company I've worked at has one or both of these symptoms. Working in the confines of those systems, it's not an irrational choice to decide that comments and other forms of documentation aren't worth trying to maintain, and are therefore detrimental.
Reject a PR?
I provide feedback on PRs. Then the owner of the PR adjusts it to accommodate my feedback and once I'm happy with it I approve it and we merge. If you're working in a place so cancerous that you can't just leave a comment on a PR reminding someone to update the comment they forgot to update I don't know why you're still there. This is called code review and it's common practice. If all you ever do is approve PRs then you're not doing code review and you might as well skip the whole PR step and let people merge into main as they please.
In any case your argument still just boils down to "I work with a bunch of stupid lazy dipshits" so why bother doing anything at all then? Write comments, don't write comments, write tests, don't write tests, do whatever the fuck you want because you're surrounded by useless dipshits and nothing you do matters anyway. Might as well write some comments for your own sake, everything's a ball of mud anyway it doesn't matter.
I'm gonna keep doing what I think is right in my sane corner of the world. And honestly I don't believe you. I think these excuses are just that. Excuses. I've been around quite a bit and haven't seen anything like you describe. Sure there's plenty of lazy dipshits but you don't have to sink to their level.
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