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I wanted to get angry at this article, but he made some good points. Still, I’ve found some organizations are more concerned with technical excellence, and othe

I wanted to get angry at this article, but he made some good points. Still, I’ve found some organizations are more concerned with technical excellence, and others see it as mastrabatory acts that get in the way of being agile to outlive competitors and putting resources only where it will obviously help the business. Obviously a lot of us like to build things that are correct, efficient, safe, and easy to maintain and not just “meets minimum requirements to keep the ship afloat” after so many years in school learning to become good engineers. It also seems like markets and disasters can seem random from a SWE point of view. You can build a great system and people just might not take to it, or the whole thing could topple over because of a third party component, a really determined hacker, etc.

menko99 8y ago
There is a selfish balancing act as well. I've been in two jobs where I'd take on more and more technical debt to deliver new features quickly so we could capture marketshare. Eventually, the technical debt killed agility and project sponsors didnt understand why every little thing took three days to do instead of one. This left me open to being ousted (e.g., the Product Manager "had a friend" who could surely do everything much faster.) Seems easy from the outside. They got rid of me, hired the friend, who both increased the team size and then re-built from scratch. Selfishly, it would have been better to more steadily deliver features and balance speed with maintainability -- because sometimes higherups dont understand the tradeoff they are making.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. Did they factor the cost of a rewrite into their calculus? I know sometimes even though a system becomes hard to move forward it would require such an investment to reach feature parity it has a sort of protection against total destruction.

menko99 8y ago

There is a selfish balancing act as well. I've been in two jobs where I'd take on more and more technical debt to deliver new features quickly so we could capture marketshare. Eventually, the technical debt killed agility and project sponsors didnt understand why every little thing took three days to do instead of one. This left me open to being ousted (e.g., the Product Manager "had a friend" who could surely do everything much faster.) Seems easy from the outside. They got rid of me, hired the friend, who both increased the team size and then re-built from scratch. Selfishly, it would have been better to more steadily deliver features and balance speed with maintainability -- because sometimes higherups dont understand the tradeoff they are making.

ilovecaching 8y ago
Thanks for sharing your story. Did they factor the cost of a rewrite into their calculus? I know sometimes even though a system becomes hard to move forward it would require such an investment to reach feature parity it has a sort of protection against total destruction.