Block CTO Says ‘Code Quality’ Doesn’t Matter, But Fixing Issues Does

In most engineering circles, clean, elegant code is the gold standard, but Block’s chief technology officer said it’s overrated.

Dhanji Prasanna, chief technology officer of the fintech company, said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday that “many engineers think code quality is important to creating a successful product,” but “the two have nothing to do with each other.”

Perfect code doesn’t make a great product, but solving real problems does, Prasanna said.

Prasanna said he learned this when he was at Google. When the company bought YouTube in 2006, Google 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 doesn’t have much to do with the quality of the architecture,” he said. The true measure of a 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 who we’re trying to build for,” he said. “All this code can be thrown away tomorrow.”

Prasanna also said that it is not important to be at the forefront of every technology trend.

“Technology is there to serve us, and if we have a purpose and an important purpose, then we can make technology serve us,” he added.

Prasanna did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Coding the apocalypse?

Prasanna’s comments come as tech leaders continue to emphasize the importance of coding in the AI ​​era.

Google’s head of search, Yossi Matias, told Business Insider last year that “everyone should learn 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 build a system, you won’t be able to evaluate its outcome,” Graber said.

Others, like Prasanna, said coding is no longer crucial to success.

Peter Schwartz, Salesforce’s chief future officer, told Business Insider in May that coding is no longer the must-have skill in the AI ​​era. “The most important skill is empathy and working with other people,” Schwartz said in an interview with Business Insider at the ATxSummit technology conference in Singapore.

As AI gets better at writing code, some product managers have speculated that it will take on more and more technical coding tasks and bypass its need for engineers.

During Google’s third-quarter earnings conference call last year, CEO Sundar Pichai said AI generated more than a quarter of the company’s new code.