Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

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Personally I'd probably leave. I think there is a point where its healthy to try to change the system but it sounds like you are fighting a current that is too strong to encourage the way you want to work.

I believe you when you say your efforts are needed - the problem is management very frequently has a hard time being able to understand that there is an upfront cost that will eventually pay off. They are looking at spreadsheets and just want to see that profit column keep on going up - you essentially are proposing that the profit column should go down a bit (development costs) with the promise that it will eventually go up much faster.

I've found that software companies either qet the necessity of quality/process or don't (also some types of businesses do not really need much software quality). Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not. By the hiring practices you listed Im guessing they don't get how software quality and process impacts the bottom line.

My pessimistic view is that very little will change with the exception of burning yourself out - sorry for the dire prediction Ive just been there myself.

"Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not.", can you elaborate a bit on this ?

According to my experience, management has always viewed software as binary world: it works or it does not.

About your last sentence, I was about to but gave myself a reason no to; instead of trying to change things, I simply leave them the way they are and stop "bitching" about it. Either way, I will see if good engineering practices are really important or if a team can do without it (and what the potential cost would be).

Now, my only focus is becoming good at spotting bugs, fixing them and implementing features with fewest lines possible (a.k.a Spartan programming) :)

> "Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not.", can you elaborate a bit on this ?

From my experience, non-technical managers often don't realize the importance of these processes. Us programmers know how important is to control how the codebase grows—when there are more than a few programmers touching the code, and when the software keeps growing, a good test suite will prevent the team from having to spend a lot of time trying to change something in the future without breaking anything else (often in vain.)

I worked for both kind of people, those who understand and those who don't. I found it was a huge PITA to work for people who don't understand, especially if they can influence the hiring process. They will have a direct impact on the culture of the team, and I don't believe a single developer can change this alone.

This is just anecdotal, but the place where I worked for this kind of people just closed the doors; the software grew to a point where it was unmaintanable and, despite all my efforts to convince them on fixing things instead of putting new features like mad, nobody ever listened. Now talk about frustration...

Edit: of course I don't believe every non-tech manager is like this. There are those who, despite knowing about nothing when it comes to software development, knows how to identify someone who does, hires this person and trusts their opinion. Basically, people who know what they don't know.

> instead of trying to change things, I simply leave them the way they are and stop "bitching" about it

Please don't do this to yourself. This is likely to go one of two ways:

1: You stop caring about quality.

2: You forget what quality looks like.

The end result is more or less the same: the quality of the software you produce is likely to go down.

I have had very similar experiences before and watched colleagues take the same path you're proposing. Whilst they may be happier in their positions, their QA goes right out of the window and things start getting even worse.

It's better to have a reputation as somebody who doesn't tolerate shit, than to have no reputation for anything other than shipping crappy software.

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