> useless engineering theater that these companies engage in, like code review and "readability",
Oh boy.
Sure, if you're small, working on your own or at an early startup, you can get away with ignoring code quality and just hack away to rapidly do amazing things. As soon as someone else is going to have to change something about that unreadable code, you're going to wish it had been written with a bit more readability.
Moving fast is great for a quick PoC, but if you're going to take that straight into production, you'll see tech debt pile up fast.
Although with large companies, there's also the fact that large companies are just intrinsically slow. I've had plenty of projects where I moved faster than the company could deal with. But also some where some people greatly appreciated the speed at which we could pivot and respond to their needs. But that speed was always built on a basis of readable, maintainable code. And every time we had to deliver something too fast, we followed it up with a period of refactoring to clean up the tech debt, so the next time we needed to, we'd be able to be fast again.
Oh boy.
Sure, if you're small, working on your own or at an early startup, you can get away with ignoring code quality and just hack away to rapidly do amazing things. As soon as someone else is going to have to change something about that unreadable code, you're going to wish it had been written with a bit more readability.
Moving fast is great for a quick PoC, but if you're going to take that straight into production, you'll see tech debt pile up fast.
Although with large companies, there's also the fact that large companies are just intrinsically slow. I've had plenty of projects where I moved faster than the company could deal with. But also some where some people greatly appreciated the speed at which we could pivot and respond to their needs. But that speed was always built on a basis of readable, maintainable code. And every time we had to deliver something too fast, we followed it up with a period of refactoring to clean up the tech debt, so the next time we needed to, we'd be able to be fast again.