this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Programming
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The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is...who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don't care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that's okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn't reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn't need you.
It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.
I believe for many companies, developers work on giant codebases with many hundred thousands or even millions of lines of code.
With such large codebase you have no control over any system. Because control is split between groups of devs.
If you want to refactor a single subsystem it would take coordination of all groups working on that part and will halt development, probably for months. But first you have to convince all the management people, that refactor is needed, that on itself could take eternity.
So instead you patch it on your end and call it a day.
Yep!
I'm looking forward to the horror stories that emerge once some percentage of those changes are made solely by unmanaged hallucination-prone AI.
I would feel bad for the developera who have to clean up the mess, but honestly, it's their chance to make $$$$$$ off of that cleanup. If they manage not to, their union is completely incompetent.