It’s no secret that I work as a freelance software/web developer and often jump around between languages. I, continually, run into projects where the developers are ignoring warnings produced by the compiler which can lead to some very sloppy code along with some very interesting situations that occur as the code runs in production.

In my experience, warnings are almost always a bug in waiting especially warnings for assignment operators used in an if statement instead of the equality operator (very common in C variants.) Spend those extra few hours when you develop and try to ensure that you keep the compiler warnings to a minimum, so your code is clean and doesn’t appear to be sloppy.

Warnings also destroy your credibility as a developer, because they make your code look sloppy and suspect whenever a problem occurs. If you’re an employer, do your developers compile with warnings on and if they compile with warnings on do they take the time to resolve them?