13. Programmers hate their old code

My old car used to break down all the time, so I was a regular at all the nearby garages. In every garage a mechanic would give me a very clever look and say: “Who the hell did this to your car?” And the second I’d say it was someone from another garage, he’d mumble something along the lines of “What an a**hole”. This dialog would repeat itself in every garage I went to, with one mechanic slagging off another.

It’s the same in IT. Whenever a new talented programmer joins the team, they look at the old code and go: “Who wrote this shitcode?”, and write a new, “better” code. This situation repeats itself every couple of years, with the “better” code becoming the shitcode again. Some programmers have even called their own old code a shitcode. Managers should take it with good humor and remember that refactoring for the sake of refactoring is a never-ending cycle that won’t ever make anyone happy.

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