Pathetic Guru

I talk a lot about how you can’t be a great developer without great communication skills, but I don’t think people grok how _directly_ your communication skills are reflected in your codebase. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you’re working in a legacy codebase that, in places, resembles a house on Hoarders (BEFORE they clean it out).

These types of codebases are distressingly common. They’re so full of STUFF that you can hardly move around. To get your work done, you’ve got little goat trails of understanding running through it, like the narrow space between piles of junk in an overcrowded living room.

There are whole sections that you don’t go near, for fear that touching them will disturb the fragile equilibrium of the junk pile & it’ll fall over, trapping you underneath.

How do you get out of a situation like that? If you just call a junk hauler to take it all away (the grand rebuild, aka “we should rewrite it as services!”) you don’t fix the real problem - which is the organizational incentives that put you in that place originally.

Do you know why Hoarders isn’t on the air anymore? It turns out that hauling everything away and cleaning up the house doesn’t fix people’s habits that led to the hoarding. Most of the show’s partipants, after the show was over, slowly went back to a hoarded house.

A much more successful treatment for hoarding is to work intensively one on one with folks, changing their habits slowly over time, & having THEM clean up the house - one little area at a time. Unfortunately for the creators of Hoarders, this makes very boring reality tv.