I remember the constant struggle with management, was trying to justify refactors and code cleanups. Every single one of them was unable to see the value added from that, they only cared about new features.
So then any even medium sized project becomes a 30 band aids on an open wound instead of the surgery needed to fix it.
I blame capitalist software development, and the profit motive which forces managers to ignore the pleas of devs to clean up the mess. You’re right it becomes death by a thousand cuts.
Another analogy that I always think of, that’s also one of the refutations of ‘intelligent design’, and a simple proof for evolution, is that the giraffe has a blood vessel coming out its heart, wraps around its neck, totalling something like 9 feet long… all to travel a required distance of a few inches. As designers at least we could make those corrections if people gave us the time to.
Absolutely, capitalism creates perverse incentives here because the goal is to spend as little effort as possible in order to produce a product that’s just good enough to be viable. I’ve had the exact same experience working on projects where delivering features was the only thing business people cared about, and refactoring never happened.
And that’s a good observation that it’s a similar dynamic to evolution where things just grow out of existing working components in organic fashion instead of getting redesigned to properly address new requirements.
I remember the constant struggle with management, was trying to justify refactors and code cleanups. Every single one of them was unable to see the value added from that, they only cared about new features.
So then any even medium sized project becomes a 30 band aids on an open wound instead of the surgery needed to fix it.
I blame capitalist software development, and the profit motive which forces managers to ignore the pleas of devs to clean up the mess. You’re right it becomes death by a thousand cuts.
Another analogy that I always think of, that’s also one of the refutations of ‘intelligent design’, and a simple proof for evolution, is that the giraffe has a blood vessel coming out its heart, wraps around its neck, totalling something like 9 feet long… all to travel a required distance of a few inches. As designers at least we could make those corrections if people gave us the time to.
Absolutely, capitalism creates perverse incentives here because the goal is to spend as little effort as possible in order to produce a product that’s just good enough to be viable. I’ve had the exact same experience working on projects where delivering features was the only thing business people cared about, and refactoring never happened.
And that’s a good observation that it’s a similar dynamic to evolution where things just grow out of existing working components in organic fashion instead of getting redesigned to properly address new requirements.