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Some people get it into their heads that just because their code works right now that it is somehow "done" and will never need maintenance, so they don't budget
by WJW 5y ago
Some people get it into their heads that just because their code works right now that it is somehow "done" and will never need maintenance, so they don't budget for any maintenance work or knowledge upkeep. Then when the world inevitably changes around the program, some of the initial assumptions are no longer valid and (possibly extensive) changes are required but no resources available to enact them. The only cheap solution available is to complain about the changes in the world and try to get them rolled back.
- sseagull 5y agoI feel like blaming developers (or management) for this is just fighting human nature which never ends well. Rather we should look at deeper root causes, like why these initial assumptions keep changing, and why there is so much churn in some ecosystems. If the incentives aren’t there to do proper maintenance, no amount of blaming people for following those incentives will fix the problem.
- WJW 5y agoI don't mean to blame anyone here, it is like you say: just human nature. The same is true about initial assumptions and software ecosystems btw, change has been their nature since basically forever and calling that a "root cause" seems like being angry at a thistle for having thorns. The world/human society has never been static, why should software be an exception to this? In any case it does not really matter; either Utoronto will eventually rewrite their firewall configs, or they won't and then they will not be able to use HTTP3. These issues have a way of eventually becoming urgent enough to fix and at that time the incentives will sort themselves out.