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No way can we slow down for a refactor, and all the original devs that wrote it have job hopped. The most likely way to escape the current madness might be for
by Silhouette 3y ago
No way can we slow down for a refactor, and all the original devs that wrote it have job hopped.
The most likely way to escape the current madness might be for a few companies with more enlightened management to actively look for people who have stayed in past roles for long enough to have real experience not just building but also maintaining software and pay them more. Same with loyalty incentives to retain existing staff. And then make sure those more experienced developers are choosing tools built to do a good job and not just tools built to make naive resume scanners happy.
If frequent job-hopping and leaving any junk you've just built to become someone else's problem stops being the fastest way to boost your career and compensation then good people and good employers will start to prioritise building stuff properly and looking after it for the long term and almost everyone will be better off.
- nucleardog 3y agoIn senior roles I’ll only hire people that have had some longer stints for exactly these reasons. If you’ve never worked anywhere long enough to have to live with the fallout and consequences of your decisions, you’re not senior in my mind. You’ve never received useful real world feedback to be given a chance to refine your approach.
- Silhouette 3y agoExactly. I've encountered a small number of people who apparently reached very senior technical positions impressively early in their career but when you looked at their job history it was mostly a string of 1-2 year stays with a title bump on each jump. SE, Senior, Lead, random nine months as a cofounder of something that went nowhere but says CTO on the resume, Staff, and now after less than a decade they're running the show somewhere with a silly name but a few million in funding. In all that time they might never have worked on a single product with sustainable revenue or been responsible for the consequences of any technical decision they made as much as one year after they made it. Maybe two of those people that I can think of weren't bad anyway - sometimes their inexperience showed but at least they weren't crazy and had open minds - but others were among the most over-rated and damaging people I've ever seen in the business.
- giantg2 3y agoMeanwhile I'm a midlevel over here with 11 years experience...
- Maxion 3y agoI wouldn’t put this as an absolute truth, over the last decade or so I’ve spent most of my time un-fucking projects that haven fucked by people making bad decision. Overengineering - nonexistent senior coders - poor infrastructure - I’ve seen the lot.
- giantg2 3y agoMy experience is that once the system is built, they outsource the maintenance, or they stack another project on your team (over time it adds up, I've been on a team supporting about 15 apps).