Code quality and communication

I find it interesting how much communication patterns and personalities influence code quality.

• If a programmer thinks he's too cool for school, sooner or later he'll end up making changes to other people's code without asking, often with undesirable side effects
• If a programmer is afraid to ask about how to do this or that, lest he's perceived as someone who is weak, he ends up creating duplicate code, reinventing the wheel, when a lot of people reinvent the wheel in different places, maintenance of large code bases can become problematic. This can also be a major waste of time, when instead of spending minutes to hours asking about an existing way to do X or Y, which may already exist, someone might spend a day or two (or god forbid even more), doing Z. 
• If everyone is afraid to take responsibility for a subsystem, that subsystem deteriorates. Each programmer sees the mess but doesn't want to / doesn't know how to clean it up, and ends up creating more of a mess. It's important that a software subsystem has an owner / a goto guy, so that there is an authority on how to do things right, and what wheels not to reinvent. 

Unfortunately communication has an overhead. 

• It takes time to get off your ass to go to a colleagues desk. 
• An expert / owner of a subsystem may be too busy to help
• Even though the subsystem expert may have a solution, it may require some wrap-up work on his side to make it fit your requirements. In the end it's a trade off between (for example) 2 hours on your side + 2 hours of his, versus 2-3 days if you do it alone. 

Overprotective system owners have a detremental effect on code quality. If you are afraid to touch the expert's code, or ask them for help, you will end up doing the same thing twice.

Helpful and friendly system owners, on the other hand, can very much help reduce the overall maintenance cost, by making sure other people use their system properly, don't reinvent the wheel. They will also try to  accomodate their subsystem to new use cases from others. It takes a little up front effort, but is worth it at the end.