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New devs almost certainly shouldn't be given maintenance and repair tasks. How can someone know all of the business logic and needs a given solution provides wi

New devs almost certainly shouldn't be given maintenance and repair tasks. How can someone know all of the business logic and needs a given solution provides within a month of starting? This problem is because the old guard wants to move on from the problems they created. They want to play with new toys. So they hire new devs to do the work they don't want and "free" themselves for greenfield development (i.e. the exact opposite of how it should be managed).

Haga 7y ago
To then repeat the same mistakes with new tech.
rantwasp 7y ago
that’s okay. they get brought in and save the day when the new guy messes up. the classic definition of win-win: you’re off the monster you created and doing things with exciting technology AND you are a hero for saving everyone on a regular basis.
- noobiemcfoob 7y ago
  Oh, this hurts so hard. I'm going to go cry now.
- AndyMcConachie 7y ago
  It sucks being the old hand as well. I was once sent to a customer's site to fix a deployment that had taken too long. It was for a telco product that required a couple racks of UNIX machines and Cisco routers. They had sent a new guy with essentially no training and he had not done a bad job. He was just new and needed time to get up to speed. When I started working with him he clearly knew what he was doing. But we got everything working 1 day after I showed up, because I had been deploying this product for a few years already. Management basically praised me and shat on the new guy. I felt like crap and took new guy aside. We became friends, but this hurt his review later on.
close04 7y ago
> New devs almost certainly shouldn't be given maintenance and repair tasks. This would just massively increase churn. Old guys get sick of doing the same old crap especially when seeing the new guys get all the good stuff. So it increases the likelihood that people will just move around a lot more often in order to build that "new stuff". Eventually you'll have lots of companies saturated with "new stuff" that's no longer so new and nobody to maintain it because everybody knows the second you're too old in the company you get saddled with maintenance tasks. > the old guard wants to move on from the problems they created Just because it's old doesn't mean it's a problem. It still has to be maintained though, with higher effort since the technology may be outdated. Even the best designed systems become a chore to maintain when you have to do it for 10 years instead of doing anything new.
- noobiemcfoob 7y ago
  There's a difference between handing new engineers ownership of maintenance tasks and training them to maintain an existing system. The age of a system isn't the problem. It's the baked in processes that are critical to the business that a new engineer could not have learned from outside of the company. Management sees that baked in knowledge as "some light configuration" when it is often far more complicated than whatever system it was built on.

Haga 7y ago

To then repeat the same mistakes with new tech.

rantwasp 7y ago

that’s okay. they get brought in and save the day when the new guy messes up. the classic definition of win-win: you’re off the monster you created and doing things with exciting technology AND you are a hero for saving everyone on a regular basis.

noobiemcfoob 7y ago
Oh, this hurts so hard. I'm going to go cry now.
AndyMcConachie 7y ago
It sucks being the old hand as well. I was once sent to a customer's site to fix a deployment that had taken too long. It was for a telco product that required a couple racks of UNIX machines and Cisco routers. They had sent a new guy with essentially no training and he had not done a bad job. He was just new and needed time to get up to speed. When I started working with him he clearly knew what he was doing. But we got everything working 1 day after I showed up, because I had been deploying this product for a few years already. Management basically praised me and shat on the new guy. I felt like crap and took new guy aside. We became friends, but this hurt his review later on.

close04 7y ago

> New devs almost certainly shouldn't be given maintenance and repair tasks. This would just massively increase churn. Old guys get sick of doing the same old crap especially when seeing the new guys get all the good stuff. So it increases the likelihood that people will just move around a lot more often in order to build that "new stuff". Eventually you'll have lots of companies saturated with "new stuff" that's no longer so new and nobody to maintain it because everybody knows the second you're too old in the company you get saddled with maintenance tasks. > the old guard wants to move on from the problems they created Just because it's old doesn't mean it's a problem. It still has to be maintained though, with higher effort since the technology may be outdated. Even the best designed systems become a chore to maintain when you have to do it for 10 years instead of doing anything new.

noobiemcfoob 7y ago
There's a difference between handing new engineers ownership of maintenance tasks and training them to maintain an existing system. The age of a system isn't the problem. It's the baked in processes that are critical to the business that a new engineer could not have learned from outside of the company. Management sees that baked in knowledge as "some light configuration" when it is often far more complicated than whatever system it was built on.