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I inherited a pipeline like this. It is as if everything is a global variable. You cannot "just fix" one thing in isolation, because some spooky action at a dis

I inherited a pipeline like this. It is as if everything is a global variable. You cannot "just fix" one thing in isolation, because some spooky action at a distance of which you were unaware relies upon this insane behavior. Each and every hack is the expected input somewhere else in the chain. You have to carefully inspect everything downstream of any kind of minor adjustment because your cleanup is quite likely to break something else. Immensely frustrating and draining where you can have accomplished ~nothing in a full day of work to fix what should have been a five minute change.

ludicity 2y ago
I'm the author. You are exactly correct. Everything was so heavily interwoven that it was impossible to tell what would happen downstream without making an edit and then tracking the changes through dozens of steps through the architecture diagram.
- baq 2y ago
  `The purpose of the system is what it does.’
- jitl 2y ago
  In this situation I’d make a second copy of a bad thing and then try to make the copy good, instead of changing anything in place. But yeah, I totally get the huge upstream fight it must be and I’m not trying to backseat drive… just marveling at how the organizational fuckups & constraints make it hard to fix obvious problems
  - ludicity 2y ago
    You're right. I actually did propose this, but the other difficulty is getting stuff put onto the Jira board. My belief, yet to be verified, is that it was possible to deliver everything the executives promised AND perform the refactoring without any drop in service, but this would have required convincing management that a well-run team could 3x productivity. Eventually everyone got tired of talking to people that were just used to bad performance, so they couldn't envision smooth CI/CD and happy workers (as opposed to contented to get paid to hang around workers, which is what happy means in many cases).
zelphirkalt 2y ago
Again and again it comes up in many scopes and contexts. Avoid global mutable state. But some people do not learn.

ludicity 2y ago

I'm the author. You are exactly correct. Everything was so heavily interwoven that it was impossible to tell what would happen downstream without making an edit and then tracking the changes through dozens of steps through the architecture diagram.

baq 2y ago
`The purpose of the system is what it does.’
jitl 2y ago
In this situation I’d make a second copy of a bad thing and then try to make the copy good, instead of changing anything in place. But yeah, I totally get the huge upstream fight it must be and I’m not trying to backseat drive… just marveling at how the organizational fuckups & constraints make it hard to fix obvious problems
- ludicity 2y ago
  You're right. I actually did propose this, but the other difficulty is getting stuff put onto the Jira board. My belief, yet to be verified, is that it was possible to deliver everything the executives promised AND perform the refactoring without any drop in service, but this would have required convincing management that a well-run team could 3x productivity. Eventually everyone got tired of talking to people that were just used to bad performance, so they couldn't envision smooth CI/CD and happy workers (as opposed to contented to get paid to hang around workers, which is what happy means in many cases).

zelphirkalt 2y ago

Again and again it comes up in many scopes and contexts. Avoid global mutable state. But some people do not learn.