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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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[–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

I once was working on a code base where the final solution to their technical debt was to... switch to another tool entirely and decommission the old one. It was cheaper, and faster, than basically rewriting the app to upgrade to a supported version of the libraries.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 7 months ago*

    Your comment reminded me of this article, The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address, which discusses the lack of technical leadership when it comes to tackling technical debt, and that the solution is usually a rewrite.

    Instead, most organisations don’t tackle technical debt until it causes an operational meltdown. At that point, they end up allocating 30–40% of their budget to massive emergency transformation programmes—double the recommended preventive investment (Oliver Wyman, 2024).

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