Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?
I am in my late 40's, I have been coding since I began uni in 1987, I have a Computer Science degree. When I got out there 25+ years ago I was all about doing things the best way, code reuse, refactor etc to get things just right. Most younger devs are. It took so much time getting the environments perfect, unit tests, etc. The customer paid for that, my managers must have been tearing their hair out watching us faffing about doing crap that ultimately didn't lead to a better experience for the customer. I am much more experienced now and live off my own skills, I have about a dozen apps on the iOS app store the number of users is 7 figures, they bring in good coin. The code behind them is crap, has not been unit tested, there are not massive build environments or anything, I don't write for reuse until I need to reuse, I acceptance test it myself. My users love the apps. They are bug free and reliable, and users often leave reviews to this effect. Experience is everything. I'm old school now, back in the day live fixes to production data were nothing, no-one would ever do that now. I met older gen devs than me, they did not then and do not now even use source control. Yet their releases were and still are 100% stable and bug free. They are still paid a premium for their thoroughness. As I grow older, I see more value in keeping it simple rather than miring down the work in process and the pressure of doing it perfectly. There is little value in it for the customer if the dev is experienced. And I'm happy that these premium jobs are now coming up for me.