[wwww4all]

It’s your company and you’ll learn the same lessons every other companies have learned in the past.

People are usually passionate about fun, interesting things. People are not passionate about boring, tedious things. Customers pay big bucks to have people do the boring, tedious things correctly.

Who is going to sanitize inputs to prevent basic sql injection hacks? Who is going to write basic unit tests to get at least 50% code coverage? Who is going to code review for basic functionality and quality standards?

Most companies ignore all the tech debt, and hope they exit before the debt comes due. Most companies fail.

Good luck.

[nikisweeting]

Oh I'd say in that regard we've already failed, we're not really massively profitable and not planning on getting any kind of "hockey stick" or exit. We're a slow growth services/consulting company that cares more about working on interesting fun stuff with our friends than pure profit.

I love doing the tedious devopsy/documentation/maintenance stuff that other people don't enjoy, so a lot of that stuff falls on my shoulders or gets spread around evenly so the people who don't enjoy it aren't stuck with it full-time.

When I leave, that stuff will get passed on to others, but we've built a culture around caring about tech debt and long-term health, and splitting that workload between interesting fun things and not-so-fun things, so I have faith that it won't collapse.

[tolbish]

Out of curiosity, what so intriguing about devopsy/documentation/maintenance stuff?

[nikisweeting]

I don't know but I love it! I started as a sysadmin and I like organizing and categorizing things, setting up config, writing docs, managing CI/CD systems, setting up git processes, etc. all that stuff is my jam even now that I spend most of my time managing or doing full-stack dev stuff.

[tolbish]

I could probably learn a lot from you.