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And then at some point the codebase becomes so unusable that new features take too long and out of frustration management decides to hire 500 extra programmers

And then at some point the codebase becomes so unusable that new features take too long and out of frustration management decides to hire 500 extra programmers to fix the situation, which makes the situation even more slow. As I understand, there is a balance between refactoring and adding new features. It’s up to the engineers to find a way to do both. Isn’t it also fair if engineers push sometimes back on management? Shouldn’t a civil engineer speak up if he/she thinks the bridge is going to collapse with the current design?

zwnow 2y ago
The issue is that management usually doesn't care. Personally I usually have about 3-4 days to implement something. If I can't deliver they will just look for more devs, yes. Quantity is what matters for management. New New New is what they want, who cares about the codebase (sarcasm). Management doesn't even know how a good codebase looks. A bridge that is missing support probably wouldn't have been opened to the public in the first place. Thats not correct for codebases.
- baq 2y ago
  > The issue is that management usually doesn't care. Neither do customers. The product is an asset. Code is a liability.
  - zwnow 2y ago
    Can't be held accountable for work conditions engineers dont have power over. If I dont have time to write tests, I cant be blamed for not writing tests. Especially now with hallucinating bs AI there is a whole load of more output expected from devs.
    - baq 2y ago
      Don't check in any code, only prompts. The product is reconfabulated on every build.
      - xamde 2y ago
        There will be companies founded on executing this idea.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      Recently I got an email that some severe security defects were found in a project, so I felt compelled to check. A bot called “advanced security AI” by Github raised two concerns in total, both indeed marked as “high severity”: — A minimal 30 LoC devserver function would serve a file from outside the current directory on developer’s machine, if said developer entered a crafty path in the browser. It suggested a fix that would almost double the linecount. — A regex does not handle backslashes when parsing window.location.hostname (note: not pathname), in a function used to detect whether a link is internal (for statically generated site client-side routing purposes). The suggested fix added another regular expression in the mix and generally made that line, already suffering from poor legibility due to involving regular expressions in the first place, significantly more obscure to the human eye. Here’s the fun thing: if I were concerned about my career and job security, I know I would implement every damn fix the bot suggested and would rate it as helpful. Even those that I suspect would hurt the project by making it less legible and more difficult to secure (and by developers spending time on things of secondary importance) while not addressing any actual attack vectors or those that are just wrong. Security is no laughing matter, and who would want to risk looking careless about it in this age? Why would my manager believe that I, an ordinary engineer, know (or can learn) more about security than Github’s, Microsoft’s most sophisticated intelligence (for which the company pays, presumably, some good money)? Would I even believe that myself? If all I wanted was to keep my job another year by showing increased output thanks to all the ML products purchased by the company, would I object to free code (especially if it is buggy)?
  - watt 2y ago
    Sounds like a dogma that got us (as industry) into this mess.
    - baq 2y ago
      I’d rather say it’s an observation of real behavior. Customers of yours don’t buy code (unless it is your product) - they buy solutions to their problems. Thus, management and sales want to sell solutions, because that gets you paid. Engineering is fulfilling requirements within constraints. Good custom code might fit the bill. Bad might, too - unless it’s a part of requirements that it shouldn’t be bad. It usually isn’t.
  - erikpukinskis 2y ago
    Well engineered code that closely models the business is an asset. Only a small percentage of code that’s ever written matches that criteria. That asset also requires you to have good relationships with people who know how to maintain it properly.
- staunton 2y ago
  > A bridge that is missing support probably wouldn't have been opened to the public in the first place. That's not always been the case and came to be because people have died... Is anyone going to die if your codebase is an unmaintainable mess?
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Companies die because nobody is willing to work on the code anymore. If VCs ever came to expect less than 90% of their investments to essentially go to zero, maybe that would change. But they make enough money off of dumb luck not leading to fatal irreversible decisions often enough to keep them fat and happy.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      > Companies die because nobody is willing to work on the code anymore. Can you name some examples? I never heard of this before.
    - staunton 2y ago
      That doesn't sound nearly as bad or serious as people dying.
      - hinkley 2y ago
        One: Have you ever tried to take a narcissists' money or power away from them? You would think you were committing murder (and some of them will do so to 'defend' themselves) Two: All the stuff we aren't working on because we're working on stupid shit in painful ways is substantial.
- hinkley 2y ago
  That’s why consistent messaging matters. If everyone agrees to make features take as long as they take, then management can’t shop things around. Which they shouldn’t be doing but we all know That Guy. When children do this it’s called Bidding. It’s supposed to be a developmental phase you train them out of. If Mom says no the answer is no. Asking Dad after Mom said no is a good way to get grounded.
- necovek 2y ago
  It depends. Most shacks built in one's backyard do not pass any building codes. Or throwing a wooden plank over a stream somewhere. Just like most software doesn't really risk anyone's life: the fact that your web site might go down for a bit is not at all like a bridge collapsing. Companies do care about long term maintenance costs, and I've mostly been at companies really stressing over some quality metrics (1-2 code reviews per change, obligatory test coverage for any new code, small, iterative changes, CI & CD...), but admittedly, they have all been software shops (IOW, management understood software too).
mrkeen 2y ago
> As I understand, there is a balance between refactoring and adding new features. True, but has drifted from the TFA's assertion about consistency. As the thread has implied, it's already hard enough to find time to make small improvements. But once you do, get ready for them to be rejected in PR for nebulous "consistency" reasons.
danjac 2y ago
Often the problem with companies running the Feature Factory production treadmill too long is you have code supporting unused features and business logic, but nobody knows any more which features can be dropped or simplified (particularly after lots of employee churn and lack of documentation). So the problem is not so much technical debt, but product debt. You can refactor, but you're also wasting time optimizing code you don't need. A better approach is to sit down with rest of the company and start cutting away the bloat, and then refactor what's left.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I was involved with a big rewrite. Our manager had on his desk the old system with a sign "[managers name]'s product owner". Nearly every time someone wanted to know how to do something the answer was load that old thing up and figure out what it did. Eventually we did retire the old system - while the new code base is much cleaner I'm convinced it would have been cheaper to just clean that code up in place. It still wouldn't be as clean as the current is - but the current as been around long enough to get some cruft of its own. Much of the old cruft was in places nobody really touched anymore anyway so there was no reason to care.
  - danjac 2y ago
    Whether you rewrite or refactor the code is not so much the point of my comment - it's more that you should first determine what you actually need, in consultation with the project stakeholders, get rid of whatever you don't need, and then you can decide whether you need to rewrite or refactor. Cutting away the bloat will give you a better perspective on that decision. Personally, I would lean towards refactoring - a rewrite is the "declare bankrupcy" stage of technical debt and should only be considered in extremis. For example, the original codebase was written in ColdFusion and in 2025 you can't find any ColdFusion developers (or anyone in their right mind who wants to become a ColdFusion developer). But in any case, rewriting a trimmed down codebase is easier than trying to replicate features you don't need any more.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    > while the new code base is much cleaner I'm convinced it would have been cheaper to just clean that code up in place I saw one big rewrite from scratch. It was a multi-year disaster, but ended up working. I was also told about an earlier big rewrite of a similar codebase which was a multi-year disaster that was eventually thrown away completely. I did see one big rewrite that was successful, but in this case the new codebase very intentionally only supported a small subset of the original feature set, which wasn't huge to begin with. All of this to say that I agree with you: starting from scratch is often tempting, but rarely smooth. If refactoring in place sounds challenging, you need to internalize that a full rewrite will be a few times harder, even if it doesn't look that way.
hinkley 2y ago
Or it becomes so unusable that the customers become disenchanted and flee to competitors. If management keeps making up deadlines without engineering input, then they get to apologize to the customer for being wrong. Being an adult means taking responsibility for your own actions. I can’t make a liar look good in perpetuity and it’s better to be a little wrong now than to hit the cliff and go from being on time to six months late practically overnight.

zwnow 2y ago

The issue is that management usually doesn't care. Personally I usually have about 3-4 days to implement something. If I can't deliver they will just look for more devs, yes. Quantity is what matters for management. New New New is what they want, who cares about the codebase (sarcasm). Management doesn't even know how a good codebase looks. A bridge that is missing support probably wouldn't have been opened to the public in the first place. Thats not correct for codebases.

baq 2y ago
> The issue is that management usually doesn't care. Neither do customers. The product is an asset. Code is a liability.
- zwnow 2y ago
  Can't be held accountable for work conditions engineers dont have power over. If I dont have time to write tests, I cant be blamed for not writing tests. Especially now with hallucinating bs AI there is a whole load of more output expected from devs.
  - baq 2y ago
    Don't check in any code, only prompts. The product is reconfabulated on every build.
    - xamde 2y ago
      There will be companies founded on executing this idea.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Recently I got an email that some severe security defects were found in a project, so I felt compelled to check. A bot called “advanced security AI” by Github raised two concerns in total, both indeed marked as “high severity”: — A minimal 30 LoC devserver function would serve a file from outside the current directory on developer’s machine, if said developer entered a crafty path in the browser. It suggested a fix that would almost double the linecount. — A regex does not handle backslashes when parsing window.location.hostname (note: not pathname), in a function used to detect whether a link is internal (for statically generated site client-side routing purposes). The suggested fix added another regular expression in the mix and generally made that line, already suffering from poor legibility due to involving regular expressions in the first place, significantly more obscure to the human eye. Here’s the fun thing: if I were concerned about my career and job security, I know I would implement every damn fix the bot suggested and would rate it as helpful. Even those that I suspect would hurt the project by making it less legible and more difficult to secure (and by developers spending time on things of secondary importance) while not addressing any actual attack vectors or those that are just wrong. Security is no laughing matter, and who would want to risk looking careless about it in this age? Why would my manager believe that I, an ordinary engineer, know (or can learn) more about security than Github’s, Microsoft’s most sophisticated intelligence (for which the company pays, presumably, some good money)? Would I even believe that myself? If all I wanted was to keep my job another year by showing increased output thanks to all the ML products purchased by the company, would I object to free code (especially if it is buggy)?
- watt 2y ago
  Sounds like a dogma that got us (as industry) into this mess.
  - baq 2y ago
    I’d rather say it’s an observation of real behavior. Customers of yours don’t buy code (unless it is your product) - they buy solutions to their problems. Thus, management and sales want to sell solutions, because that gets you paid. Engineering is fulfilling requirements within constraints. Good custom code might fit the bill. Bad might, too - unless it’s a part of requirements that it shouldn’t be bad. It usually isn’t.
- erikpukinskis 2y ago
  Well engineered code that closely models the business is an asset. Only a small percentage of code that’s ever written matches that criteria. That asset also requires you to have good relationships with people who know how to maintain it properly.
staunton 2y ago
> A bridge that is missing support probably wouldn't have been opened to the public in the first place. That's not always been the case and came to be because people have died... Is anyone going to die if your codebase is an unmaintainable mess?
- hinkley 2y ago
  Companies die because nobody is willing to work on the code anymore. If VCs ever came to expect less than 90% of their investments to essentially go to zero, maybe that would change. But they make enough money off of dumb luck not leading to fatal irreversible decisions often enough to keep them fat and happy.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > Companies die because nobody is willing to work on the code anymore. Can you name some examples? I never heard of this before.
  - staunton 2y ago
    That doesn't sound nearly as bad or serious as people dying.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      One: Have you ever tried to take a narcissists' money or power away from them? You would think you were committing murder (and some of them will do so to 'defend' themselves) Two: All the stuff we aren't working on because we're working on stupid shit in painful ways is substantial.
hinkley 2y ago
That’s why consistent messaging matters. If everyone agrees to make features take as long as they take, then management can’t shop things around. Which they shouldn’t be doing but we all know That Guy. When children do this it’s called Bidding. It’s supposed to be a developmental phase you train them out of. If Mom says no the answer is no. Asking Dad after Mom said no is a good way to get grounded.
necovek 2y ago
It depends. Most shacks built in one's backyard do not pass any building codes. Or throwing a wooden plank over a stream somewhere. Just like most software doesn't really risk anyone's life: the fact that your web site might go down for a bit is not at all like a bridge collapsing. Companies do care about long term maintenance costs, and I've mostly been at companies really stressing over some quality metrics (1-2 code reviews per change, obligatory test coverage for any new code, small, iterative changes, CI & CD...), but admittedly, they have all been software shops (IOW, management understood software too).

mrkeen 2y ago

> As I understand, there is a balance between refactoring and adding new features. True, but has drifted from the TFA's assertion about consistency. As the thread has implied, it's already hard enough to find time to make small improvements. But once you do, get ready for them to be rejected in PR for nebulous "consistency" reasons.

danjac 2y ago

Often the problem with companies running the Feature Factory production treadmill too long is you have code supporting unused features and business logic, but nobody knows any more which features can be dropped or simplified (particularly after lots of employee churn and lack of documentation). So the problem is not so much technical debt, but product debt. You can refactor, but you're also wasting time optimizing code you don't need. A better approach is to sit down with rest of the company and start cutting away the bloat, and then refactor what's left.

bluGill 2y ago
I was involved with a big rewrite. Our manager had on his desk the old system with a sign "[managers name]'s product owner". Nearly every time someone wanted to know how to do something the answer was load that old thing up and figure out what it did. Eventually we did retire the old system - while the new code base is much cleaner I'm convinced it would have been cheaper to just clean that code up in place. It still wouldn't be as clean as the current is - but the current as been around long enough to get some cruft of its own. Much of the old cruft was in places nobody really touched anymore anyway so there was no reason to care.
- danjac 2y ago
  Whether you rewrite or refactor the code is not so much the point of my comment - it's more that you should first determine what you actually need, in consultation with the project stakeholders, get rid of whatever you don't need, and then you can decide whether you need to rewrite or refactor. Cutting away the bloat will give you a better perspective on that decision. Personally, I would lean towards refactoring - a rewrite is the "declare bankrupcy" stage of technical debt and should only be considered in extremis. For example, the original codebase was written in ColdFusion and in 2025 you can't find any ColdFusion developers (or anyone in their right mind who wants to become a ColdFusion developer). But in any case, rewriting a trimmed down codebase is easier than trying to replicate features you don't need any more.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  > while the new code base is much cleaner I'm convinced it would have been cheaper to just clean that code up in place I saw one big rewrite from scratch. It was a multi-year disaster, but ended up working. I was also told about an earlier big rewrite of a similar codebase which was a multi-year disaster that was eventually thrown away completely. I did see one big rewrite that was successful, but in this case the new codebase very intentionally only supported a small subset of the original feature set, which wasn't huge to begin with. All of this to say that I agree with you: starting from scratch is often tempting, but rarely smooth. If refactoring in place sounds challenging, you need to internalize that a full rewrite will be a few times harder, even if it doesn't look that way.

hinkley 2y ago

Or it becomes so unusable that the customers become disenchanted and flee to competitors. If management keeps making up deadlines without engineering input, then they get to apologize to the customer for being wrong. Being an adult means taking responsibility for your own actions. I can’t make a liar look good in perpetuity and it’s better to be a little wrong now than to hit the cliff and go from being on time to six months late practically overnight.