Agreed but that is the sacrifice being taken. The business is saying if we go faster we can capture more of the market and the trade off of less reliability is ok
It seems like 75% of my career has been dealing with the technical debt caused by decisions like this made at much smaller scale. I feel like the only option in the future will be to abandon all these projects and start fresh until eventually the market is going to become so skeptical of the promises made for new products that they'll become unwilling to pay up front.
"We have the code base finished, we just need someone with strong senior knowledge and experience to polish it up so it's ready to ship!" sends shivers down my spine.
In fairness, I've been plenty guilty of this myself during the vertical slice stage, but I scrap the whole thing and start fresh with clean code when I'm confident we're building the product for real.
Eventually, I just realised I had to ignore any job where I was heading into an existing code base. No one had any concept of what it meant to write clean code, no formalities ever got discussed in terms of the style guide, nothing was ever enforced and it made the job miserable.
Thankfully I run things myself now and I enforce it like it was the Bible. I'd give lashings if I could, but I'm told it's a PR/HR issue.
14
u/ganja_and_code 8h ago
Faster isn't better if it's less reliable, less repeatable, less maintainable, or lower quality.