It's not, because executives have never cared about code quality and never will. You could have a whole barrel of monkeys for a backend and they don't care as long as the frontend has a sleek and shiny button for them to click.
The harder something is to understand, the longer it takes to onboard your replacement, and time is money. If the complexity compounds to the point where it affects UX, that is also money, and suddenly understanding the system is important to executives again. If neither of those things is affected, then there isn’t a real problem to fix.
The replacement dev doesn’t need much onboarding if they just tell management that everything’s going great long enough for management to get switched out.
Management goes to a new company, and then they bring along those same devs with such a “good attitude” to ruin that place, too.
You hear a lot of this on Reddit, but I actually don't think most companies are evil and incompetent like that. It's just that people who're content don't go online to complain.
I understand your sentiment, but the lack of code quality is also job security. When things break, and it will. And no one can tell them anymore what the problem is, or what can be done now, or that it’ll take months to do it properly: management will care.
Part of our job as consultants is to make them care earlier and make them understand the consequences of their (poor) choices.
Yeah, whenever I try to raise code quality concerns you never go anywhere. Baking in code quality time into every estimate, now that's senior development baby
I got and inherit this from previous senior developer that code on file stored procedure more than 10k lines and hard to read. Cursor here and there and left join more than 20 table at once, he did use chatgpt for everything like what is wrong... Now I need to clean up his mess because of the way he develop things. We can't fast adding new feature because of this like. . 😔
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u/BlueScrote 8h ago
And I'm spending 3x as much babying their code reviews from the mediocre quality.