I am fairly new to "enterprise" programming, but have some experience with self-study and open source. I'm getting more frustrated by the day because the code quality of our software is appallingly bad: functionality that should be centralised isn't, assumptions about internal structures and functionality of objects are made throughout the code, concerns are not separated, and so on. In my current team, we explicitly disabled SonarQube because "someone would have to fix it and our software wouldn't pass even after a month of work".
While I understand the concerns that companies would rather see new features than "quality improvements", so what? Every time we want to add something, we either have to restructure half the source code or add it in a really horrible way (and get pressured to do it that way).

Is it normal that code quality in companies is so bad?

Yes

yesn't

So I started out working on my own at small company
When I finally made it to "the big leagues' guys getting paid 80k a year who were supposedly seniors converted an ado.net code model using stored procedures to a linq to sql model using ad hoc queries

They said that they had over a pb of data in the database.

I didn't know any better because my WORKING application I built myself worked on small amounts of data and was designed by someone just starting their career

But let's put it this way
I segmented a very large data source that took a straight read through forever to process and it reduced search time to nothing

They could have just created a separate security schema for organization and generated a separate set of stored procedures per quarter and divided the data into tables by quarter for starters

Index size wouldn't really change so more ram or more servers
But their idea was make it slower

Sometimes people in billion dollar corporations who are calm because their bullshit has worked seem smarter than some guy who just spent 6 months unemployed was nervous as hell and had the anxiety of supporting himself and a girlfriend who's mother had died and who was scared shit less of ending up in the street

But they are frauds

All this collective bullshit has done nothing but suck life out of people and hurt our country and make life harder than it should be

The take away is that the country looks like trash right now because this bullshit way of life leads to that and is just an excuse to help fucked up people do fucked up things and the natural result is dirty run down streets buildings and crazy liars and wrongly limiting the potential of decent folk

And now as before the collective sewage is oozing over everything
Maybe we'll see the brief well organized time period where people wake up and say "let's be healthy and happy and good"

Problem is they left a surprise in the form of twisted people who don't care

Yes, the bigger the company gets, the worse it gets. The problem is that when you have 2 people who love their job, they will deliver good code. When you have 20 people, chances are high that at least two just don't give a fuck and then the manager will say "Well does it work? Cause we need that feature asap" ... and then your code is doomed. Honestly, your best bet is to try and be responsible for a small part that is yours and yours alone; then at least you can do it correctly there.

Look, when you have one or two people working on a project, they can communicate directly with the customer so everything is up to spec. But when you have 20 people, you need to communicate with the customer through some manager, you don't have a 1:1 contact to directly discus possible solutions, some things go back and forth multiple times, and you can't have 1/3 of the team slacking off because you're still gathering all the information to make some important structural decision. That's why some things are bound to change half way through, and when they do, you can't stop everything and rewrite the code, you have to make those changes while maintaining as much progress as possible.

@hitko I only half agree. You can have a manager do that OR you can have a requirements engineer do it. If he knows his stuff, he will press the customer to decide certain things beforehand and deliver a good requirements catalogue.

On the dev side you will have people who know how to build a modular design that can be changed easily and you will have people who build giants monoliths that are a pain to change. A good dev will reduce dependencies, which pays off in the long run.

@CodingTripledad Lol no. It doesn't matter who communicates with the customer or who makes the plan, it doesn't matter how modular the whole thing is. You have 20 people working on the project and they need to work, they can't just stop working for a couple hours whenever they find something that needs to be discussed further. The role of a lead developer or project manager or whoever the fuck you want to take care of it is to tell those people how to continue their work while someone contacts the customer and figures things out. That's it, that's how every good team works regardless of who's in charge or how the project is organised.