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IME (22+ year career so far) there's a balance to be struck. If you wait to ship till you're happy w the code, you probably waited too long. Successful business

IME (22+ year career so far) there's a balance to be struck. If you wait to ship till you're happy w the code, you probably waited too long. Successful businesses are often built on surprisingly shoddy software, and time to market matters. OTOH, only ever running in naive startup mode -- "ship it yesterday, add features nownownow, any means necessary, shortcuts be praised" -- is a recipe for disaster. Given your strong feelings on the matter, maybe you could find a way to help surface the costs and help your org to start fixing them. Because some amount of it is inevitable, and things within a given company only get better when someone cares enough to do something about it. If it works, you're a hero and things improve. If not, you can still jump ship, but with a much better narrative: not "I got tired of the intolerable levels of tech debt", but "I did (X) in an effort to address [same], but ultimately couldn't overcome the institutionalized patterns that led to it, so I'm looking to work for a company that cares about software quality".

Retric 6y ago
One way to separate the two is took look for a steady stream of removed features. A startup that pivots from trading magic the gathering cards to selling bitcoins can obviously remove a lot of dead code. That’s essentially what it means to be an agile company. Hoarders however only try and add features which always results in a drop in quality as the UI becomes unmanageable. Long term it’s an unavailable dumpster fire in the making and a clear sign to jump ship.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Mark hoarded nothing wrong !
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Upvoted; great point! Esp, 1st paragraph.
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  In an ideal world, this is how
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  In an ideal world, this is how things would work. The problem is, those features were created for customers. They will not take kindly to those features being removed. And no-one wants to lose customers. This is why the second law of thermodynamics applies also to software engineering. Entropy only increases.
whitten 6y ago
That is an interesting image. "surfacing the costs". It evokes the idea that most technical debt is below the surface (hidden by the UI ?) and so is rarely noticed by anyone other than the programmers. The trick is, how do you let the internal problems and inconsistencies become visible to the end-users so the decision makers will decide to put time and effort into resolving them without being fired because the program appears to be falling apart ?
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Thanks; and yes - I do believe, strongly, that business owners / stakeholders generally radically under-appreciate the costs of unintentional tech debt, which is mostly invisible to them. Regarding your proposed (tongue-in-cheek?) tactic of somehow making it apparent to end users as a way to get the attention of said stakeholders: user-perceived performance is actually, seriously, the bridge you're looking for. Companies are increasingly aware that performance (in the sense of site speed / WPO / UX latency) matters ^1. Suboptimal performance follows directly from failure to address tech debt. Efforts to improve performance are always stymied by tech debt. Thus, execs who learn to care about performance have become your allies. 1. https://wpostats.com https://wpostats.com

Retric 6y ago

One way to separate the two is took look for a steady stream of removed features. A startup that pivots from trading magic the gathering cards to selling bitcoins can obviously remove a lot of dead code. That’s essentially what it means to be an agile company. Hoarders however only try and add features which always results in a drop in quality as the UI becomes unmanageable. Long term it’s an unavailable dumpster fire in the making and a clear sign to jump ship.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Mark hoarded nothing wrong !
chrisweekly 6y ago
Upvoted; great point! Esp, 1st paragraph.
ArnoVW 6y ago
In an ideal world, this is how
ArnoVW 6y ago
In an ideal world, this is how things would work. The problem is, those features were created for customers. They will not take kindly to those features being removed. And no-one wants to lose customers. This is why the second law of thermodynamics applies also to software engineering. Entropy only increases.

whitten 6y ago

That is an interesting image. "surfacing the costs". It evokes the idea that most technical debt is below the surface (hidden by the UI ?) and so is rarely noticed by anyone other than the programmers. The trick is, how do you let the internal problems and inconsistencies become visible to the end-users so the decision makers will decide to put time and effort into resolving them without being fired because the program appears to be falling apart ?

chrisweekly 6y ago
Thanks; and yes - I do believe, strongly, that business owners / stakeholders generally radically under-appreciate the costs of unintentional tech debt, which is mostly invisible to them. Regarding your proposed (tongue-in-cheek?) tactic of somehow making it apparent to end users as a way to get the attention of said stakeholders: user-perceived performance is actually, seriously, the bridge you're looking for. Companies are increasingly aware that performance (in the sense of site speed / WPO / UX latency) matters ^1. Suboptimal performance follows directly from failure to address tech debt. Efforts to improve performance are always stymied by tech debt. Thus, execs who learn to care about performance have become your allies. 1. https://wpostats.com https://wpostats.com