When Software Engineers Hide Behind "Reality" and KPI: A Critical Look at Industry Bad Habits

In an era where software is said to be "devouring the world," the author questions how many programmers truly deserve the title of engineer. Drawing a parallel to the classic critique "The Ugly Chinese," the piece reflects on the "ugly software people" who embody unflattering industry habits.

Slacking Packaged as Philosophy

The buzzword "worker" has become an excuse for avoiding responsibility: "I’m just a worker, I do whatever I’m paid for." Some even glorify "fishing" (idle time) as a politically correct stance, claiming it is "work‑life balance" or "learning" while browsing games and short videos during work hours.

Comparing to the Worst ("比烂哲学")

Instead of striving for excellence, some teams settle for being just a little better than the worst, using the mantra "the neighboring team is also bad" to justify subpar code, missing documentation, and vague Git commit messages.

KPI as Life Goal

Testing for the sake of testing leads to green CI pipelines with 90% coverage that hide serious defects. The author describes a unit test that merely checks for non‑null objects and passes, while ignoring attribute correctness, logic errors, and edge cases. High coverage becomes a bragging right, yet low‑level bugs still surface in production.

Agile Turned Destructive

Teams proclaim "We are agile!" but interpret the Agile Manifesto as "working software replaces all documentation." Design diagrams, architecture docs, and API specs disappear; knowledge resides only in code. Newcomers are forced into "code archaeology" with unreadable, poorly named, and un‑commented code, leading to knowledge loss when developers leave.

"Reality" as an All‑Purpose Shield

Whenever improvement is suggested, the retort "That's just reality" is used to dismiss it. Refactoring tangled code is postponed with "no time, business pressure," legacy architectures are left untouched with "launch first, fix later," and monitoring is ignored with "as long as it runs, it's fine." These compromises gradually turn systems into fragile structures that eventually collapse.

Knowledge Hoarding

Some senior engineers hide their expertise, using obscure variable names, cryptic logic, and minimal comments. During code reviews they focus on superficial style issues to assert authority, and when they leave, half the team's knowledge disappears, leaving an unmaintainable technical legacy.

Resume‑Driven Development

Enthusiasm for new technologies is often motivated by résumé appeal rather than problem solving. The author cites examples where a tiny system is split into dozens of microservices or a low‑traffic site is forced onto a full Kubernetes stack, causing a steep drop in development efficiency. When questioned, the justification is always "industry trend" or "future high concurrency," even if the promised future never arrives.

In the conclusion, the author urges developers to stop using "reality" as an excuse, to avoid downward comparison, and to prioritize real user value over superficial KPI metrics. True engineers seek optimal solutions within constraints, while "ugly software people" use constraints as a pretext for delivering junk code.