Why Code from Other People Always Sucks

I’ve worked on quite a few projects in the time I’ve been in working in development. I’ve noticed a couple of similarities between all projects when a project is inherited from another group. Not too long after the developers get to look at it, something universally is always said by one or more members of the team. “This code sucks.”

I’ve said it myself before but I got to wonder if others do this. There are only a few reasons this could happen:

1. The previous code does suck
2. The new team has better ways of doing things over the previous team
3. The code doesn’t suck, but it’s just what is said when inheriting new code

Now I seriously doubt that most of the code out there sucks but it is a perception that most developers seem to have. Everyone has their own way of doing things and most times, one is not all that better than another; just different.

This is also caused by progress in my opinion. Something that might have seemed correct a few years ago is now seen as obsolete. Also over-thinking a project can cause this. I worked on a site a few years ago that was written using many PHP include files. That’s not such a bad idea but it was overdone because many of its includes had includes of their own and it was a really tough project to maintain. In my opinion, it was a good idea gone overboard.

Occasionally there will be a site that truly “sucks”. I was part of a team that inherited a site that was in dire straights. The code made no sense, the design wasn’t appealing at all and no one visited it. We were lucky enough that the client was aware of these things and we were allowed to start from scratch. Now I wonder if the people working on that site now think that it sucks. Probably

There are many different characteristics that programmers look for in “good” code. The issue is that these characteristics differ between groups of programmers and what is the bread and butter for one team will be nothing more than garbage and a hassle for another. Because programming is such a subjective art, not everyone will agree on the right way to do things because what is right for one person, might not be right for someone else. Everyone and every team has strong and weak points and the idea is to code using your strongest abilities. In turn, that will make your code better.

My goal when I come across new code is to not jump on it and say how horrible it is, but to rather spend some time looking at it and try to understand why certain things were done that way. If you are able to step outside your comfort zone and think of things a different way, you might learn something that you hadn’t thought of before.

So before you announce that the code you just inherited “sucks”, take a closer look at it and try to get into the mind of the previous programmer. If you still can’t make any sense of it, it’s because it probably sucks.