If you’ve ever seen a great chef cooking, you’ll see a pattern. Every couple of chops, every couple of minutes, the chef cleans up his station. He’s almost maniacal about it. He’s usually in the kitchen all day long and he wants it to feel like a good place to be around. He also knows that not doing this is a pandora box waiting to be opened and that it’ll effect the food quality.
For software engineers, our code base is our station. This is where we spent 8 to 16 hours a day. In my career, I’ve seen around 10 code bases and I know for a fact that team morale was much higher in a well maintained code base. It felt good to come to work and work on clean code base. Messy code bases are out there and they might be generating huge revenues. Yet, just like a messy kitchen, they’ll require a great energy to find anything in them or to get anything good out of them. That’s no environment for a chef, a software engineer or anybody to be in.