Should they care? I’ve come into organisations that had spent entire years worth of man hours on setting things up correctly so that they could potentially scale to millions of concurrent users. Organisations which would never reach more than 50.000 concurrent users in their wildest dreams.
On the flip side I’ve seen some extreme cowboy hacker man code run perfectly fine for its entire 10 year life cycles.
Now, I don’t think you should go completely cowboy, but I do think you should think about whether or not your “correctness” is getting in the way of your actual job. Which is typically as a service function where you’re supposed to deliver business value at a rapid pace. Obviously it depends on what you do. If you work in medical software you’re probably going to want to get things right, but just how much programming could be perfectly fine if it was just thrown together without any adherence to “correctness”? The theory tells you it’ll cost you down the line, and in some cases it will. In my anecdotal experience it’s not as often as we might like to think, and sometimes the cost is even worth it. In two decades I’ve only ever really seen two poorly build systems cost so much down the line that they would’ve been better off having been build better from the get go. In both cases they couldn’t have been build better upfront because the startups didn’t have the people to do so.
On the flip side I’ve seen some extreme cowboy hacker man code run perfectly fine for its entire 10 year life cycles.
Now, I don’t think you should go completely cowboy, but I do think you should think about whether or not your “correctness” is getting in the way of your actual job. Which is typically as a service function where you’re supposed to deliver business value at a rapid pace. Obviously it depends on what you do. If you work in medical software you’re probably going to want to get things right, but just how much programming could be perfectly fine if it was just thrown together without any adherence to “correctness”? The theory tells you it’ll cost you down the line, and in some cases it will. In my anecdotal experience it’s not as often as we might like to think, and sometimes the cost is even worth it. In two decades I’ve only ever really seen two poorly build systems cost so much down the line that they would’ve been better off having been build better from the get go. In both cases they couldn’t have been build better upfront because the startups didn’t have the people to do so.