Little Tasks, Little Trust

Consider doing your refactoring while working on your feature, then it can't be bumped.

I've said it before: one of the goals of Agile methodologies as sold to management is the promise of emulating a good developer with a redundant array of mediocre developers. Good developers can produce good work fast. They can take feedback on an iteration and turn it into working code for the next iteration quickly. But they're unreliable -- prone to getting cranky or bored -- and they're a single point of failure: If they die or quit because they got too cranky or bored, million dollar projects can be put in jeopardy.

But by spreading the work out over a team and making them collectively responsible for the code, and by keeping them constantly in communication, it is hoped, you can take advantage of their cumulative brainpower to get good developer quality and turn around time while smoothing over the reliability issues because any one developer is fungible with the rest.

It is hoped, that is. Reality is usually quite different...

IMO the problem with this approach is it draws a line between “tech debt” and “progress”. So in the end, the team will overcompensate to do less and less “tech debt sprints” or start expanding it into an occasional “tech debt half”, and so on.

What I think works better is having a tech debt related goal _as part of product work_: instead of estimating you’ll work on feature X, also add time and be explicit about tackling issues around X. This also prevents wasting time on debt that’s not really relevant (is a piece of code that never fails and never change really worth rewriting?). This makes it easier to tackle it over time, easier to sell to product & management.

“Tech debt” itself is a bad term IMO - it isn’t an aspect of software that’s easily identified (unlike, say, compilation warnings), and you can’t count it as money-debt, so I always found the concept of “paying it down” sorta counterproductive. But that’s a different topic altogether.

Industrialization overtakes craftsmanship.

Hi [redacted] (fogetti),

It’s humorous that I came across your post calling someone a "control freak" and to expose themselves on HN so you can avoid working with them.

Last I remember you got fired from our company within a year. The reason was mostly for bad mouthing every single engineer as well as the CEO behind their backs and sometimes even to their faces when you were in a managerial role.

You constantly power harassed the engineers to the point where we all decided to completely ignore you and some of us even thought about leaving the company. One time you even got into a screaming match in the middle of our open office with an engineer in front of all the other employees in the office.

Also you cannot call someone a “control freak”. You would monitor every engineer meticulously and complain to the CEO over any little thing anyone did. You are a complete narcissist who would only talk about himself. Things always had to be your way. You absolutely would not want to hear any “new thoughts” or “opposing perspectives”. You were so bad in fact we would call you the “dictator”. There were so many complaints against you that CEO himself had to demote you and put someone far more experienced from our team in charge instead. However due to you being such control freak you protested with the CEO and HR and refused to even attend the meeting discussing it and started to bad mouth them on slack in the public channel.

During your last few weeks at the company every single employee avoided you like the plague. Having you at our company was a miserable experience and I would not wish it on any other start up. We almost threw a party when they finally kicked you out.

Since I hurt the narcissist, I fully expect a long reply about how you “worked” in many other countries and how you were an engineer at Nokia that one time etc. I also want to say I’m in no way defending the person you are replying to I just find the whole comment you made extremely ironic.

If you are an employer in Tokyo stay far away from [redacted].