Turns out, the hard part of software is figuring out what to build.
The rest is cheap in comparison, whether done in SF or Bangalore.
The rest is cheap in comparison, whether done in SF or Bangalore.
In other cases, it's skilled people that just don't want to apply 100% effort and are just coasting, maybe for external reasons (some folks can write decent code without 100% effort in the moment due to practice beforehand).
If your code is unmaintainable you become hostage to your own code because making changes breaks things, causes frustration, etc
I totally get the idea of job security if you’re maintaining a codebase that only you understand but that is very likely to bite you back quite badly, especially if you’re a contractor: you may not get any new work, the code you write is very visible and can be judged quite quickly by a qualified person
There are obviously times when you can truly "write yourself out of a job." That truly happens.
I think that there are far more times where a transparent and earnest approach to managing technical debt and keeping things maintainable for your clients leads to more work in the long run. Possibly even permanent employment if that's what's desired.
(Of course, this depends entirely upon your communication skills and the client's savvy and receptiveness to such an approach)
Because the usual reality is that any client who needs consulting work in the first place is certainly going to need more of it in the future - maintenance, iterations, new projects, etc.
1. figuring out what to build
2. for non-trivial/long-lived projects, figuring out how to build it in a way that makes scaling, iteration, and maintenance something other than a total nightmare. (of course, many projects are one-off projects that don't need to be engineered for the long haul)
That’s not how software is done though.
Product managers are in a constant negotiation with engineers to decide what to do. There is a lot of back and forth and exchanges to arrive to a set of stuff that can then be built.
That’s what the agile routine is about.
As a team, we can't just go all vigilante, but we can push back and have at times gone over other people's heads to make sure the proper people understood the problem. Most of the time we got what we thought was best for the customer by going over people's heads, but there's been plenty of times that a middle ground was reached.
The main thing is to not just say "we can't". Our job is to deliver solutions, not products. If there is a problem with priorities, we find an acceptable way to make things "work". Maybe that's adjusting timelines, or features, or just asking the customer how important that timeline is to them. I can't tell you how many times I've been told about "deadlines" that the customer never actually said was a deadline.
Us: Yo cust, can we slide that project 2-4 weeks?
Them: Sure. Heck, move it back 2 months if you want, but we absolutely need to start testing on our end in 3 months.