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Your Engineers Aren't Lazy, Your Codebase Is Punishing Them (piechowski.io)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.

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[–] 20 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Last place I worked we were promised a sprint where all we would do is tech debt fixes. Guess what never happened since the top brass kept pushing new feature requests on us. Features kept taking longer and longer to implement and every release we had more and more bugs make it into production.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well, yeah - that never happens. You do tech debt cleanup "as you go". Slip in a few tickets to cleanup specific things and have a policy to update code that is touched when adding features / fixing bugs.

    It needs to be a continual cleaning process. That's why it's called debt - the longer you let it go un-paid the harder it is to do.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn't interested. He said his boss said "he doesn't want people gold plating things".

    Okay. I guess we'll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.

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