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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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[–] 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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