I work in office that has remote locations on the other side of the country, so people literally have to phone it in sometimes. Even some of the local employees only come to the office three or four days a week and so they’re also phoning it in sometimes. But sometimes there’re people who are present who are still phoning it in. Be it people who have three monitors at their workstation rather than the standard two, so that they can watch their favorite movies on one screen all day long while they code on the other two. Or people who write code that looks like they don’t care if no one else can read it. Accessing data columns or traversing the control tree by index, for example, instead of using column names or IDs. Or using multiple nested html tables for page layout when that’s not what they’re for. Seriously, that’s so last century! Or doing the old copy-and-paste routine, literally within 10 lines of the previous usage of a block of code, and not bothering to take the 3.57 seconds it would take to move it into a reusable function so you can save 3.67 seconds of latency for every single page request that pulls down that client-side code.
Developers, we are here to do a job. And we are here to do it together. None of us is an island. Show some respect. Please try to look like you think your work is as important as the rest of us think it is. And write every code block as if it will be framed one day as an example of what your company’s code base ought to look like. Your life has a purpose. Please don’t waste it just phoning it in.
From Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code:
