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by codeflo 1524 days ago
> In my career I feel like I have seen hundreds of examples of me saying the systems equivalent of “lets put the dining table indoors?” to be told that the dining table is outside because the original budget meant the front door could only be yay wide so we had to leave the table in the yard and put a tent over it. And I’m just left standing there agape at how we eat in a cold wet tent every night instead of fixing it.

Oh wow, that hits home. To be fair, the historical context for the decision can be valuable information, the problem is the next step. Even if you can't fix it right now, you might make steps towards that. Or you might say: Now that we have this heavy table outside, why not attach more things to it?
1 comments
orzig 1524 days ago
I agree, the impasse that I often see is between people who think a change must happen “now“ and those who think it should happen “never“. There is a lot of space between those positions, an optimal usually exists in there.

It’s just like re-factoring heavily interdependent code, except without the advantage of the dependencies being written down

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Aeolun 1524 days ago
> the impasse that I often see is between people who think a change must happen “now“ and those who think it should happen “never“

The problem is that the organisational equivalent of ‘later’ is ‘never’. Therefore, if something needs to actually be done, the only time is now.

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jseban 1524 days ago
> There is a lot of space between those positions, an optimal usually exists in there.

Yeah but finding, or rather estimating, this optimal is a lot of work, and requires you to have one foot in both camps, and some kind of process/authority to make a decision, and some incentive to make a short term sacrifice for long term gain. That's just not going to happen in a weekly sprint planning, in a company that's aiming for the next quarterly report.

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iso1210 1524 days ago
By all means say the change will happen in 3 months time instead of never.

Then in 3 months time the choice is the change will happen now, or it will happen never.

You can schedule it for the future, but the choice will always be "do it now" or "don't do it now".

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gorgoiler 1524 days ago
This is a really helpful way of describing a solution.
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