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Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

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Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#71

Post by r00fus »

H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

There's a saying when I was in the military: "If it affects you, it's your problem".

If your code blows up, it will come back to haunt you. Now you get to fix your code, except it involves a bunch of other teams. Maybe that's what you want, but most likely not.

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#72

Post by Jtsummers »

macevilc wrote: post #69
H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

This advice is soo very wrong. As a programmer you need to think first. The code you write is gonna affect your life maintaining it. So it does affect you or some other developer maintaining it. By actually caring you make things easier for you and your peers and that helps you grow your career.

Whenever someone writes a comment like GP's, it's safe to assume they are not involved in long term maintenance of a system. Or they're like my current team, reveling in the paid OT their shoddy work lets them justify (which is now unpaid for them, but paid for me, watch your contract terms people!).

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#73

Post by whateveracct »

H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

Because you eat shit later when it blows up or makes your life more difficult.

Also, not having agency about how you spend your energy eats away at the soul. That's more subjective, but I'll do a way better job with way less effort if I am a primary decision maker of what work I'm doing instead of an intake machine.

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#74

Post by H8crilA »

35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #61
H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

The fastest way to cap your career growth is to think about yourself as someone whose role is to take a spec and provide a technical solution inside that box. Upper management values – and pays accordingly – people who go beyond that. Learn some finance, learn to mentor others, learn to talk with a customer and understand what they're really after. You'll gain trust and find that you're being pulled into things far e…

Oh, playing the ladder can be rewarding. But you don't achieve that by saying "our code will be piss if we ship too quickly" if a decision has already been made without you. Don't be clueless, you must get your seat at the table first.

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#75

Post by VonGallifrey »

H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

> If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. [...] Then watch it blow up, or maybe it will actually be good enough.

You apparently have never been sued for your managers decisions.

Here is how that was for me:

My manager released something I worked on, despite me saying that it would need a few more months of work. Apparently that would have made this unprofitable, so he disregarded my advice and they released it anyways. I joined the company when this project was already a Year late. So it was not surprising that this project was close to costing more than the customer would pay.

Except for a few interns, I was the newest dev in the company, so I didn't push super hard for more work on this project. However I was the most experienced dev on the team, so I should have pushed more.

Or should have at least got it in writing that they decided against my recommendation.

When it eventually crashed and caused a 30 minutes outage I was fired.

Why? Because it was my code that was the problem of course. Never mind the fact that I told them it is not ready and that the error wasn't even code that I WROTE. Some intern wrote that part. I wasn't a lead or manager and had nothing to do with it.

They then tried to sue me for more money then they ever paid me. 30 minutes of factory outage can be very expensive which they of course tried to recuperate out of my bank account.

I was very lucky that I had a good lawyer. Actually I could only afford a very junior lawyer, but he was sick on the day of trial and asked his professor to go instead. I was probably super lucky with that one.

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#76

Post by janstice »

makeitdouble wrote: post #5
Guthur wrote: post #4

One of the problems I have found is that we don't talk the same language when communicating with the business, we use terms like "Technical Debt", "Test Coverage", even "Minimal Viable Product". In my opinion the universal variable across all these is risk, and it's easy for all to grasp what we mean when we say the word "Risk". There is delivery risk, will be get this out in a timely fashion for the market. There is…

I am not versed enough in car things, but it seems to me this would be something maintenance shops nailed down decades ago. How would they convey that your car is lacking maintenance even if you can still drive it to work ? Perhaps we should go with "needs repair" or something like that ? "Risk" feels like insurance territory (which goes along with "there is always some risk"), and a lot of people beautify the notion…

More than needs repair - I think that a pretty good analogy for tech debt is deferred maintenance - if you don't change your oil or your tires the chances of expensive/bad problems increases. If you've got dents in the body you will need to address these before a respray.

And if you have a 15 year car with a clapped out motor, you are not going to achieve modern safety and fuel efficiency by swapping the worn-out motor with a NOS replacement, so there's a point where investing money in the old solution isn't going to move you into the future you need.

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#77

Post by bgro »

Guthur wrote: post #4

One of the problems I have found is that we don't talk the same language when communicating with the business, we use terms like "Technical Debt", "Test Coverage", even "Minimal Viable Product". In my opinion the universal variable across all these is risk, and it's easy for all to grasp what we mean when we say the word "Risk". There is delivery risk, will be get this out in a timely fashion for the market. There is…

Businesses frequently don't understand the need to fix tech debt / testing / maintenance / security. They just think it's just code for the engineers wanting to "sit around and do nothing" (this is the actual phrasing I was told) because it doesn't add new features they can sell and "contributes nothing to the company."

Re: Is management pressuring you to deliver unfinished code? (2020)

#78

Post by bgro »

H8crilA wrote: post #53

Here's a question: why do you, as an engineer, care? You're just an employee, it is the upper management's role to make sure your company moves forward, maintains the trust of clients, has reliable enough solutions. If they decide to sacrifice quality for speed that's their problem/decision. Really. You were hired to provide technical solutions within specs, and if specs require fast completion more than quality then…

If your team fails because you have incompetent leadership, then YOU are the one who suffers.

Upper management doesn't go around looking at what individual people are doing. They just see Team X as a whole keeps having problems, so Team X is literally sitting around and doing nothing.

There's no need to talk to people and communicate. Just fire them. There's no other possible reason they're having problems other than lazy engineers not doing anything.

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