In most engineering circles, clean, elegant code is the gold standard, but Block’s chief technology officer said that’s overrated.
Dhanji Prasanna, the fintech company’s technology lead, said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday that “a lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product,” but “the two have nothing to do with each other.”
Perfect code doesn’t make a great product, solving real problems does, said Prasanna.
Prasanna said he learned that when he was at Google. When the company bought YouTube in 2006, Google’s engineers were horrified by the video site’s codebases and “how terrible their architecture is.”
Yet YouTube, not Google’s Google Video, became one of the most successful products in the company’s history, Prasanna said.
“It really has very little to do with how well it was architected,” he said. The real measure of the product’s success is whether it actually serves users and solves a problem for people.
“Just focus on what we’re trying to build and whom we’re trying to build for,” he said. “All this code can be thrown away tomorrow.”
Prasanna also said that it’s not important to be at the forefront of every technological trend.
“Technology is here to serve us, and if we have an important reason for being and an important purpose, then we can make it that technology serve us,” he added.
Prasanna did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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Coding apocalypse?
Prasanna’s comments come as tech leaders continue to emphasize the importance of coding in the AI era.
Google’s head of research, Yossi Matias, told Business Insider last year that “everybody should learn how to code,” and the basics may be more critical than ever in the age of AI.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told Business Insider in July that people need to know how to code well. “If you don’t know what good code looks like, if you don’t know how to actually build a system, you’re not going to be able to evaluate its output,” Graber said.
Others, like Prasanna, have said coding is no longer crucial for success.
Salesforce’s chief futures officer, Peter Schwartz, told Business Insider in May that coding is no longer the must-have skill of the AI era. “The most important skill is empathy, working with other people,” said Schwartz in an interview with Business Insider at the Singapore tech conference ATxSummit.
As AI gets better at writing code, some product managers have speculated that AI will increasingly take on technical coding tasks and circumvent their need for engineers.
During Google’s third-quarter earnings call last year, CEO Sundar Pichai said AI generated over a quarter of the company’s new code.
