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I think engineers are super bad at deciding where to take on technical debt. Often people will save themselves half a day at the cost of making some future fea

I think engineers are super bad at deciding where to take on technical debt. Often people will save themselves half a day at the cost of making some future feature nearly impossible. I don't really blame the engineers, but rather the system -- the customers demand new things, then there are biweekly "sprints" to set deadlines, and there are daily standups where nobody wants to say "I'm doing the same thing I did yesterday and it's not done yet." In that system, saving five minutes at any cost is the right thing to do, and then you get boiled alive by your technical debt. I honestly think that the glacial pace of software engineering is mostly due to this phenomenon -- "where can we save a little bit of time today?" and then it snowballs into entire teams not getting anything done. The interest on the loan they took out is higher than their income. I guess that's why they call it technical debt. (Does that make Scrum Masters technical loan sharks?)

dboreham 5y ago
You can tell that this is occurring because you'll never hear someone say at the standup "I got nothing done since the last standup because [yarn|sbt|cargo] blew up spectacularly and I spent two days figuring out what was happening and that I had to revert to the previous point release that still works".
- steveBK123 5y ago
  I think management induced agile/standups are there to produce this outcome. If your boss wants to see/hear daily updates, they don't want to see daily reports of non-progress. Developers who don't get that intuitively quickly learn it when they get the wrong type of questions after the wrong type of updates. Tail wagging the dog.