You are doing god's work, son. Thank you.
To the GP: Swizec has it, please don't stop.
For example, I have a friend who sometimes fixes bugs in compiled software running banking systems with no access to the original code and woefully out of date documentation. He gets paid some 300eur an hour in a country where the median developer salary is only about 30k eur per year (about 14eur/h)
Sure, that particular type of problem likely/hopefully isn't caused by copy-paste programming, but it is caused by the sort of endemic issues copy-paste programmers to produce.
A competent programmer borrowing code would likely factor it in in a way that won't present maintenance burden later on, and first of all would know when borrowing is appropriate. An incompetent programmer may produce problematic code even regardless of whether it's borrowed or original.
(Though I'd agree that incompetent programmer borrowing chunks of code from different sources without thinking is ‘worse’ than same programmer just writing bad code by himself—more predictability in the latter case.)
In my case, I regularly see borrowed code in projects that I maintain. As long as it's contained in an isolated module, documented (unless it's short and obvious) and used appropriately, I don't see a problem.
Interestingly, front-end code I work on seems to suffer from much worse-quality borrowing—it's like Python people lose all their discipline once they turn to JavaScript.
I'm sort of in between "get shit done" and "fix other people's shit" in my work. Because I like to take pride in my work, and because I don't want to leave the full timers with yet more contractor mess, I take care to do my job as well as I can. And I prefer projects where I can be proud of everything I do.
But in the 'trenches' of unsexy work, where my ideals meet reality, neither I nor the full-timers always have the time, money, or expertise to do things right, and are sometimes even forced by management to just get it done.
And I don't always mind. I can be happy with the result because it serves its purpose, and I made both the managers and many customers happy, even though I cringe at the underlying mess we produced. I know it is likely to cause much more work down the road, and I would generally advise against 'ship first, refactor later', but I'm also okay with the idea that I provide work for specialists to fix my mess.
Can I call myself a 'programmer'? Or am I more of a 'code monkey'? Do 'real' programmers thumb their nose at my sometimes shoddy code?
I don't really care. I'm happy with my work, and with my solutions. My aim is to move towards being able to provide full, high-quality solutions, because that makes me happier. But it also makes me happy to creatively solve problems in a way that might be imperfect, or frowned upon by some.
The most important reason for me to provide good, solid, readable code is because I care about the full-timers I meet who don't enjoy fixing my mess, and because I don't want my client to get into trouble later. That's why. It's primarily (but not exclusively) because I work with humans and I don't want to abuse my 'privilege' as a contractor and (relatively) skilled communicator to give other people headaches and crying fits over having to fix my junk. I've seen that happen, and it sucks.
(sorry, not necessarily directing this at you specifically)
> whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad
