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   Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:31 JST Chris Ammerman

   The great dirty secret of the software industry is that an awful lot of the work that is critical to sustainably build and maintain a software system/product/whatever only happens in the wild because one person with a little extra care and a little extra time decided "I'm not going to wait for this to get priority. I'm not going to wait for permission. I'm just going to do this because it should be done, and damn the consequences."

   • clacke repeated this.
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     danjac (danjac@masto.ai)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:30 JST danjac

     in reply to

     @cammerman I learned a long time ago that going the extra mile for an employer is a waste of time, energy and sanity, and if you have care for the craft then save it for open source and side projects you either care about or have some control over.

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     danjac (danjac@masto.ai)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:35 JST danjac

     in reply to

     @cammerman if I see a critical bug in work code? I'll raise it, make a ticket, but unless it's something I personally caused then I'll let the manager prioritise it. My work there is done.

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     glyn (underlap@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:38 JST glyn

     in reply to

     @cammerman The choice is to pay up front to write code properly or pay much more when it's too late, if the code survives that long. The companies I worked for understood this, but I know not every company does.

     I wonder if the bad practice you describe is more prevalent in application software? If you are developing libraries and tooling, for example, poor quality really costs a lot when users hit problems and these need diagnosing and fixing.

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     Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:42 JST Chris Ammerman

     in reply to

     • glyn

     @underlap

     Some very real factors that go into decisions to defer maintenance/quality work:

     1) we'll have more money later, so we will better be able to afford it
     2) we are hoping to sell the company before this needs to be done, and think that it will cost us more money to do, than not having done it will knock off the valuation
     3) if I put my political capital on the table for this now, I won't have it to use later, whereas if I wait till it can't be denied, it won't cost me that

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     Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:45 JST Chris Ammerman

     in reply to

     • glyn

     @underlap these are all fairly cynical takes that make me kind of nauseated, but they are real, and people do use these reasons.

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     Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:49 JST Chris Ammerman

     in reply to

     It shouldn't be this way. It's irresponsible beyond reason for businesses to operate this way. The most miserable job I've had was a leadership position where every time I tried to make room for people to do what they knew was right, someone would ring the fire alarm and declare a new emergency that had to preempt all the maintenance work.

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     Ben Curran :azure: (bencurrandev@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2024 16:27:53 JST Ben Curran :azure:

     in reply to

     • Matthew Skelton

     @cammerman @matthewskelton “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

     I was always totally this person, all of the good progress in our team was made by me and two others doing the Things That Needed To Be Done in our downtime and after we burnt out and stopped doing it, all progress halted and the ensuing train wreck behind our engine that could has never been fixed. Because nobody else has stood up.

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     Orjan (cunobaros@mendeddrum.org)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 10:59:03 JST Orjan

     in reply to

     @cammerman It's also worth underlining "one person". In most teams I've been in the last thirty years, no more than a third, and often less, are interested in infrastructure work.

     clacke likes this.