The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again.

IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and have appropriate QA/testing in place...the latter often taking far more effort than the actual writing-the-code time itself, even when a human does it.

If 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem.

That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.

Depends on how you define "boilerplate". E.g. Terraform configs count for a significant number of the total lines in one of my repos. It's not really "boilerplate" in that it's not the exact same everywhere, but it is boilerplate in the since that setting up, say, a pretty standard Cloud SQL instance can take many, many lines of code just because there are so many config options.

Terraform is verbose.

It's only boilerplate if you write it again to set almost the same thing again. What, granted, if you are writing bare terraform config, it's probably both.

But on either case, if your terraform config is repetitive and a large part of the code on an entire thing (not a repo, repos are arbitraty divisions, maybe "product", but it's also a bad name). Than that thing is certainly close to useless.

Android mobile development has gotten so …architectured that I would guess most apps have a much higher rate of “boilerplate” than you’d hope for.

Everything is getting forced into a scalable, general purpose way, that most apps have to add a ridiculous amount of boilerplate.

To add: it’s been my experience that it’s the company that thinks the boilerplate code is some special, secret, proprietary thing that no other business could possibly have produced.

Not the developer who has written the same effective stanza 10 times before.

Is it though? It seems to me like a team ownership boundary question rather than an architecture question.

Architecturally, it sounds like different architecture components map somewhere close to 1:1 to teams, rather than teams hacking components to be closer coupled to each other because they have the same ownership.

I'd see too much boilerplate as being a organization/management org issue rather than a code architecture issue

25% of new code might be boilerplate. All my apps in my organization start out roughly the same way with all the same stuff. You could argue on day one that 100% of the code is boilerplate and by the end of the project it is only a small percentage.

You're probably thinking of just raw codebases, your company source code repo. Programmers do far, far more boilerplate stuff than raw code they commit with git. Debugging, data processing, system scripts, writing SQL queries, etc.

Combine that with generic functions, framework boilerplate, OS/browser stuff, or explicit x-y-z code then your 'boilerplate' (ie repetitive, easily reproducible) easily gets to 25% of code you're programmers write every month. If your job is >75% pure human cognition problem solving you're probably in a higher tier of jobs than the vast majority of programmers on the planet.

Doing the same thing but faster might just mean you are masturbating more furiously. Show me the money, especially from a CEO.

you probably underestimate the endless miles of verbose code that are possible, by human or machine but especially by machine.

Or a statement of pride that the intelligence they created is capable of lofty tasks.