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Everyone who does maintenance work thinks they could do better than the original creators, most of the time they are wrong. They go and decide to do a rewrite
by username90 7y ago
Everyone who does maintenance work thinks they could do better than the original creators, most of the time they are wrong.
They go and decide to do a rewrite by committee to ensure everything is clean now, sit in endless meetings discussing the best way to do things, end up with a product doing half the things of the old one since they make even slower progress than the pace they would go at even with massive amounts of technical debt, and because their clean solutions actually are less flexible than the old "ugly" ones. Now we have two versions of the products to maintain since we couldn't migrate everything meaning we now have more technical debt than before. The result is roughly the same as if someone just sat and churned through everything on his own, just that you now don't have a clear culprit to blame.
- watwut 7y agoI like how you build strawman maintenance programmer and completely twist original debate around. Good rhetorical trick, but not much more. In practice, purely maintennace programmer is rare up to not existing. Most people do both maintennace and new projects. I have seen many people who wanted to cherry pick the best tasks, never coordinated and left after "finishing". They never even learned about issues of their decisions - because they run away as their creation was becomming hard to keep.
- lucideer 7y agoMy comment above is anecdotal, based on people I've worked with & managed over ~15 years. Others will have different experience than I and will have worked with different individuals, but in my own career I've never worked with the type of engineer you're describing.