Maybe I am getting too familiar with bad code, but as I get more experienced, I tend to read comments less and less, sometimes actively avoiding them.
Most of the comments I see are useless, outdated, or worse. Code, on the other hand, doesn't lie. Well commented code is nice, but there is no guarantee that comments match the code, it is better if code can be understood without the comments.
This is a common problem in companies with coding rules that require a minimum comment/code ratio. People will write comments for the sake of writing comments. There will probably be also formal specification and design documents, user manuals, etc... That's great on paper, and the dev doing that will probably answer correctly to your interview questions. However, chances are they are all full of lies. Because, doing all that and keeping it up to date is really time consuming, and there are deadlines to meet.
To put things simply, I've never worked on a well documented project. By well documented I mean that the documentation is better than grep. Some big open source project are good but I still sometimes end up with grep. The only part where people can be serious is in public API documentation.
Most of the comments I see are useless, outdated, or worse. Code, on the other hand, doesn't lie. Well commented code is nice, but there is no guarantee that comments match the code, it is better if code can be understood without the comments.
This is a common problem in companies with coding rules that require a minimum comment/code ratio. People will write comments for the sake of writing comments. There will probably be also formal specification and design documents, user manuals, etc... That's great on paper, and the dev doing that will probably answer correctly to your interview questions. However, chances are they are all full of lies. Because, doing all that and keeping it up to date is really time consuming, and there are deadlines to meet.
To put things simply, I've never worked on a well documented project. By well documented I mean that the documentation is better than grep. Some big open source project are good but I still sometimes end up with grep. The only part where people can be serious is in public API documentation.
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