Programming

Spot-on analogy.

who is actually stopping them from dealing with it?

Management. Someone in management sets idiotic deadlines, then someone tells you “do X”, you estimate and come up with “it will take T amount of time” and production simply tells you “that’s too long, do it faster”

they don’t care about the details or maintenance

They don’t, they care about time. If there are 6 weeks to implement a feature that requires reworking half the product, they don’t care to know half the product needs to be reworked. They only care to hear you say that you’ll get it done in 6 weeks. And if you say that’s impossible, they tell you to do it anyway

you have to include the cost of managing technical debt

I do, and when I get asked why my time estimations are so long compared to those of other colleagues I say I include known costs that are required to develop the feature, as well as a buffer for known unknowns and unknown unknowns which, historically, has been necessary 100% of the time and never included causing us development difficulties and us running over cost and over time causing delays and quality issues that caused internal unhappiness, sometimes mandatory overtime, and usually a crappy product that the customers are unhappy with. That’s me doing a good job right? Except I got told to ignore all of that and only include the minimum time to get all of the dozens of tiny pieces working. We went over time, over cost, and each tiny piece “works” when taken in isolation but doesn’t really mix with everything else because there was no integration time and so each feature kinda just exists there on its own.

Then we do retrospectives in which we highlight all the process mistakes that we ran into only to do them all again next time. And I get blamed come performance review time because I was stressed and I wasn’t at the top of my game in the last year due to being chronically overburdened, overworked, and underpaid.

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.

Yes, this. Refactor first to make the upcoming change easier and cleaner, not after. Don’t ask for permission, don’t even call it refactoring or cleanup. Just call it working on the feature, because that’s what it is. Don’t let non-engineers tell you how to engineer.

Can confirm. Was quite unhappy in my mechanical engineering job, had an opportunity to develop something nice in python, was told we'd do it in excel/vba instead, still unhappy.

Or maybe 80% of people are unhappy. No data here either

If all you bring to the job is looking shit up and telling me yes or no instead of actually trying to help me find solutions, or explaining me what I did wrong, you're just a glorified robot. You're in line for replacement and you'll fucking deserve it. At least that's what I wanna say to "the computer said" people.

Automation is always incremental.

I'm an accountant. Components of the job have been being automated or systemised for many decades. Most of the tasks that occupied a graduate when I was one 20 years ago don't exist anymore.

Not because AI is doing those tasks but just because everything became more integrated, we configure and manage the flow of data rather than making the data, you might say.

If you had to hire 100 professional programmers in the past, but then AI makes programmers 10% more efficient than previously, then you can do the same work with 91 programmers.

That doesn't mean that 9 people were doing something that an LLM can do, it just means that more work is being completed with fewer programmers.

If your job can be replaced with GPT, you had a bullshit job to begin with.

This one's funny to me, because the people who WILL try to replace you with GPT don't care if they CAN replace you with GPT. They just will.

Look at how it's haphazardly shoved into everything for no reason whatsoever already.

The secret is just to do it anyway. I have yet to work in a job where anyone actively stopped me fixing technical debt, even if they never asked me to do it.

It is. Source: We've had the same issues for years, but never get any time allotted to fix them.

Yeah, that's probably more the issue. We've seen too many times throwaway code become production code because "it works already, we need to move forward".

It’s hilarious when the identified problems come back around to bite the organization, when the priorities have been to work on poorly specc’d features instead.

I don't care what your fancy RAMrod doohickeys say Johnson! We need that system up tomorrow so we can reach our quarterly earning projections for the shareholder's meeting!