People Code

No one would pay developers over $100/hour if they didn’t have a sense the developers could produce quality work. But characterizing quality is difficult. One defining attribute of quality is the notion of humanistic details. In an artistic portrait, it’s all about the details of shading, linework, contrast, etc. Software engineering is equally about the details.

As developers, we don’t just create functional personifications of a business, it’s an expression of creativity. The pinnacle lies where the creativity and articulation of the developer is highly refined. It holds a representation of the human encoding it. Considering multiple developers touching the same code, it becomes much deeper than unique personalities.

This is why businesses are willing to pay $100+/hour, much less $300+/hour. They want personality in their codebases. Because personality means humanity, something only expressed to computers by those who focus on the details. Refining details means the software is more likely to be readable in the future. Code that breaks is code that lacks humanity. In the long term, software built for machines fails; building for humans stands the test of time.