Code Quantity =/= Personal Awesomeness
“ Look at all the code I wrote! ” — #CowboyDeveloper If you hang around #CowboyDevelopers for any length of time, you’re sure to hear the above refrain. It is a bit of a catch-all phrase, but the situations you’re most likely to hear it involve 1. Bragging Rights : Code quantity as a proxy for capability. Or, to put it differently, “ Mine is bigger than yours ”. 2. Settling Arguments: After all, it’s a well known fact that the amount of code you write is directly proportional to how correct your implementation is . 3. Continuing With The Current Approach : Basically the Sunk Cost fallacy , the amount of code that was written by the #CowboyDeveloper is consider dispositive evidence that the current approach is correct. The commonality to all of this are the implicit assumptions that a) Writing code is hard. b) Therefore, the more code you’ve written, the more hard work you’ve do...