Repeating this banality does not make it true. There were tons of tech companies over the past 30 years or so who, despite solving the same problems, lost out to competitors because they had worse programmers.
I actually agree that the code is one of the most important things to get right at a software company. Still. I would argue very few companies win on code merit alone either though. Strategy, customer communication, market timing, etc on the business side; design, system architecture, dev velocity on the technical side. So many factors are important beyond the quality of the code.
If anything matches the definition of banality in this discussion, it's the puerile assertion that writing code is software development.
It isn't.
Even at FANGs the first thing they say to newjoiners and hiring prospects for entry level positions is that the workload involving writing code amounts to nearly 50% of your total workload.
And now all of a sudden are we expected to believe that optimizing the 50% solves the 100%?
hn_throwaway_99|19 days ago
robertclaus|19 days ago
locknitpicker|19 days ago
If anything matches the definition of banality in this discussion, it's the puerile assertion that writing code is software development.
It isn't.
Even at FANGs the first thing they say to newjoiners and hiring prospects for entry level positions is that the workload involving writing code amounts to nearly 50% of your total workload.
And now all of a sudden are we expected to believe that optimizing the 50% solves the 100%?