Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by repelsteeltje 874 days ago
I beg to disagree. Although I've only worked for European and US companies, my experience is that even bossy bosses appreciate quality design and understand that lack of time, pressure and exploitation cause products to degrade. But pressure can only exist if there is an equally opposing force — you, me, us.

If my recommendation to bluntly quit sounded harsh, I'm happy to tone that down. There is value in compromise, but just make sure your voice is heard, say no if you cannot / will not do it in such little time to the extent that you feel is required. Fighting for the time to do our job well is our struggle. Sometimes it's easy, more frequently it's hard, but when it's simply impossible — have your boss find someone else.

Quality — at least internal quality — is primarily the responsibility of the software developer, not her/his boss or some QA department.

1 comments

I don't think it sounds harsh, and I have worked with dozens of tech companies and directly for a dozen or so - the only one that wasn't obsessed with cheating out on quality to make a buck was bilking his customers so much that he didn't care.

At every phase of the conversation is management saying they have this hard deadline and

I have been fired multiple times for being too vocal about the failures of process or technology, though mostly I just get ghosted for pushing back when things are unreasonable, at this point I exclusively go for visualizations, gantt charts, etc - to communicate that the timelines are not possible with the current investment in the team/tech/whatever.

I just got laid off for (as far as I can tell) being the person who kept asking the question about why we were doing a thing that provided no technical or business value for a year, and in most of these cases some exec thinks they know best because they read some magazine equivalent that tells them this is the new hype revolution.

Basically if you can find some highly skilled or highly profitable company that's concerned about losing their edge you might be able to do this, but your next boss might change the entire equation.