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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Is that the fault of the devs or the broken processes where management promises unrealistic deadlines up the chain, so devs have no time to think about the bigger picture and just do everything in their power to ship something that barely works at the end of each sprint and move on to putting out the next fire?

To me, the fault is in the industry and how the ships are run.

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I agree the problem you are describing also exists.

But I think the GP here is describing when people really can’t program. Like they can only write trivial programs by copy/pasting code from stackoverflow, and they don’t understand CS at all.

That is a different issue then knowledgeable devs cutting corners to meet deadlines.

If you hire inexperienced people who don't know CS and can't think critically and only copy-paste off S.O., then it's entirely on you.

If that's happening, it's either a calculated decision or the senior devs aren't doing their job. Someone should be communicating to management that the solution won't scale, with estimates of when it will fail or maximum load and the amount of time it will take to do it correctly.

Sometimes it's legitimately not worth optimizing something that will never need those optimizations. Sometimes management doesn't realize something needs to be optimized before it falls over. Sometimes management does make a bad call and doesn't want to optimize something that should be, but that's been uncommon (at least for me).

Senior devs aren't the big decision makers. Management is.

Right. My point is that senior devs should be communicating the consequences of continuing down a rushed path. If management doesn't listen, they're making a calculated business decision (right or wrong).

If management is going down a rushed path and unaware of the tech debt piling up, that's a failure of senior developers to raise those issues.

Senior devs are good at communicating but management and execs aren't good at listening, they're good at counting beans. They don't care about tech debt because that's the issue of devs to work with.

They will not believe you until actual issues happen. People in general are very good at dismissing problems that are right now biting someone else. You can see it all the time, even here in hacker news. And if anything, management is especially good at being confident that things will work out.

My senior experience is that if I see trouble that requires management intervention ahead, I communicate about it and then bail out. Trying to save it will just burn me out and as long as I am trying to fix issues, management thinks everything is ok and I am just stupid worrier. The issues must get real bad for them to be noticed and fairly often, it is best to let them go there fast.

Pretty much this, there have been times in my career when I was prepared to do everything the right way, but deadlines and unrealistic expectations from people who don't even know what JavaScript is forced my hand, so the product was less pretty internally but still functioning.

For most people software engineering is about driving results, not making everything beautiful under the hood. Although it's nice to do that when you have time.

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