5 ms·

Maybe join an open source/non-profit software company (like Mozilla). I don't know that those places have better code, but probably less pressure to ship produ

• afarrell 9y ago
  I used to work at a company whose main product was built on top of an open source project they also were the sole maintainers of. The code for that open source project was not great and, when I and a more senior engineer wanted to refactor it to make it cleaner and add functionality, we got pushback of the form "The current codebase is already tested. If you change it, it could introduce bugs." Meaning that users had "tested" it by using it and reporting bugs that then got fixed. I was so stunned by that argument that I didn't know what to say at the time, but this is bad because: 1) Many users won't report bugs because that takes effort and they just want to solve their problem 2) Users won't report when the UX is bad. 3) Not being able to change a product to add clear business value...prevents you from adding value. This is bad because it makes it harder for your product to help the business grow and solve more problems. 4) Not being able to change the code to be cleaner and more well designed makes it hard to add more maintainers and to add or remove features. I don't know how to explain why you should want to be able to change your product. I've only moved on to an org which had a much different approach to technical debt.