How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tech Debt • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tech Debt

#11

Post by mzarate06 » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 8:20 AM UTC

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #4

My lead taught me at my internship that "working code is better than no code. As you get better and come back to it, your working code will eventually be clean code." We have a super small team so my lead can easily say those things, but I have learned to agree. Get the product to work. Who cares if you've got a function with inefficient algorithms right now. You've got a deadline and something that works fine. You c…

I typically sum this up with a phrase Kent Beck made popular:

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

I've shared that with a couple teams in the past, and it always catches on.

https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast

Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tech Debt

#12

Post by lootsauce » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #10

sib301 wrote: post #7

Off topic: Everyone using “How I learned to stop worrying and…” for their titles is getting really stale.

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and..." Titles Considered Harmful

AFAIK HILTSWAL is not a thing but IMHO it should be.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tech Debt

#13

Post by coolgeek » Fri, Aug 06, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

sib301 wrote: post #7

Off topic: Everyone using “How I learned to stop worrying and…” for their titles is getting really stale.

Gentlemen - you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tech Debt

#14

Post by AllegedAlec » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

uCantCauseUCant wrote: post #9

AllegedAlec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working code is better than no code. As you get better and come back to it, your working code will eventually be clean code That only works under the assumption that you have time to come back to it. I've also seen cases where you just get 15 years of cruft, good intentions and bad implementations, at which point people never want to touch it again, because the last time they did they accidentaly broke a client's s…

I noticed the warning sign for such accumulated crust and culture, is usually a exponential dev team growth curve. We just need 4 new devs this year and 8 new devs next year. All that while the actual product is at linear growth. Yes, it works, but its foreseeable that it will end working in n-years were dev-team size and cost is bigger then the whole money the product earned.

A warning sign isn't actionable perse though. All of our developers know that we're heading for a disaster, be it in a decade or 2 years. But given that we're busy a 100% of the time implementing new features for existing customers or setting up our software for new ones. There's no time for us to start fixing this mess, and even if we did: that doesn't pay the bills.