[claytonjy]

How should a company address this? They can provide developers cover and time to improve those processes, but that delays product goals at a time when those goals are more important to the ongoing survival of the business than at any point in the past decade+. If companies wouldn't let developers fix stuff when money was easy, how will they now that money is hard?

To make matters slightly worse, I increasingly get the sense that outside of HN, most devs will jump through all the flaming hoops of bad process, accumulating all the little burns, without ever considering it doesn't have to be this way. Improving internal dev workflows gets more pushback from devs than management in my experience, which makes me feel like a crazy person.

[throwawaysleep]

I am someone who routinely pushes back on improvements and fights them. Why?

1. I get held accountable for delays. The Scum Master will whine to me about "why is X taking so long?" and I capitulate as I do not care.

2. Production bugs are blameless. The team gets blamed as a whole and it gets blamed, particularly at one job, on the non-existence of a team lead.

Basically, incentives at two of my jobs make me want to turn every ticket into a production failure.

But this is me sacrificing everything about the code and the infrastructure to keep schedules happy and that is because I have no intrinsic need to do good work at my throwaway jobs. It makes things miserable for the other developers who do care though.

[claytonjy]

I really appreciate this reply from the other side. Seems like a rational response to incentives, even if as a potential coworker I don't like the outcomes.

[galdosdi]

In my experience the problem isn't really lack of time/resources, but lack of accountability. There's always more to do than there's time and you just have to estimate and prioritize.

But even for cleanup efforts that clearly are worth the time/priority, places that develop these problems really bad usually make it very difficult to be in any way rewarded for thinking ahead to how your technical choices today will impact things in a year or more. People who stay there internalize this lack of accountability and stop trying.

You need your people to feel like caring about and investing in the future is a valued priority. Otherwise, they won't, and then you'll arrive in that future, and it will suck because everyone didn't care to build a good one.