4 ms·

Problem is even if your manager's manager understands the value of it, his manager's manager doesn't, so time spent on it is seen as wasteful or "doing nothing"

Problem is even if your manager's manager understands the value of it, his manager's manager doesn't, so time spent on it is seen as wasteful or "doing nothing" versus duct-taping things together for some poor sap to have to refactor ("for free") under pressure while implementing more features non-technical PMs or managers want ASAP. You have to be skilled at office politics or make sacrifices to keep code quality high. Usually not worth it. You get yelled at less if you externalize all the costs to future suckers, instead of trying to reduce those costs upfront.

jiggawatts 4y ago
> externalize all the costs to future suckers I literally just had this exact meeting yesterday. So much basic maintenance had been skipped that a suite of apps was costing too much money to migrate to a new platform. Instead of asking for more budget for that app, the dev manager suggested using the money from an upcoming project for an unrelated app to finish off this one! It's a literal Ponzi scheme, using funds from newcomers to pay off the technical debts of previous projects. Which of course never ends. Now the next project will go over budget, leading to rushed work, corner cutting, and drawing down on the project after that, which in turn will be a mess, etc... It's fascinating to watch this kind of stuff unfold as an outsider.
epgui 4y ago
I realize that my comment doesn’t scale and only works for a minority of people but… Just try really hard to not work for shortsighted people or bad companies. There are tons of great workplaces out there that will treat you like a king and pay you very well. Keep looking, these “almost too good to be true” companies exist. Vote with your feet at every opportunity.
- namaria 4y ago
  Paying attention to tooling helps. Python shops are hit and miss, but golang and c# centered outfits have been better in my experience.
  - epgui 4y ago
    FWIW, my experience has been that companies using less popular languages with a good reputation (Haskell, Clojure, lisp, OCaml...) are really, really awesome places to work and learn.
    - namaria 4y ago
      Certainly something I imagine to be true, I just haven't been fortunate enough to get deeper in that direction. My first contact with programming logic was The Little Schemer though, and I'm incredibly glad for that.

jiggawatts 4y ago

> externalize all the costs to future suckers I literally just had this exact meeting yesterday. So much basic maintenance had been skipped that a suite of apps was costing too much money to migrate to a new platform. Instead of asking for more budget for that app, the dev manager suggested using the money from an upcoming project for an unrelated app to finish off this one! It's a literal Ponzi scheme, using funds from newcomers to pay off the technical debts of previous projects. Which of course never ends. Now the next project will go over budget, leading to rushed work, corner cutting, and drawing down on the project after that, which in turn will be a mess, etc... It's fascinating to watch this kind of stuff unfold as an outsider.

epgui 4y ago

I realize that my comment doesn’t scale and only works for a minority of people but… Just try really hard to not work for shortsighted people or bad companies. There are tons of great workplaces out there that will treat you like a king and pay you very well. Keep looking, these “almost too good to be true” companies exist. Vote with your feet at every opportunity.

namaria 4y ago
Paying attention to tooling helps. Python shops are hit and miss, but golang and c# centered outfits have been better in my experience.
- epgui 4y ago
  FWIW, my experience has been that companies using less popular languages with a good reputation (Haskell, Clojure, lisp, OCaml...) are really, really awesome places to work and learn.
  - namaria 4y ago
    Certainly something I imagine to be true, I just haven't been fortunate enough to get deeper in that direction. My first contact with programming logic was The Little Schemer though, and I'm incredibly glad for that.