[questionableans]

It’s not necessarily disdain, it’s the fact that writing code is necessary but not sufficient to make a successful software project. To have the most positive impact, sometimes you have to focus on the parts that everyone else finds difficult or uninteresting, yet are still important.

[rixed]

Sure! You mean writing documentation, aligning divs, writing tests, caring for the infrastructure, right?

[questionableans]

If it’s important and it’s not getting done, yes.

Let’s take aligning divs.

What’s the real problem here? The front end looks really bad and it’s causing us to lose potential customers.

Why is that? Maybe we have a shortage of frontend devs. Maybe the frontend code is a mess and people are just hacking in small changes here and there to minimize the time they spend with it. (Maybe both.)

What do you do about it? Fix the alignment now to stop the bleeding. Through that exercise, understand what’s wrong with the front end architecture, get engineering buy-in on an easier approach, and train devs and/or refactor code (efficiently, prioritizing and allocating effort commensurate with the problem), pairing with some devs who have been suffering from the pain and are interested in finally being able to fix it. Advise management on whether we’ll need more frontend talent even after we fix the alignment issue. If so, suggest who might be a good candidate to transition to more frontend work, or else work with sales to lobby for hiring more front end devs even though we have zero headcount budget.

That’s principal level aligning divs.

[rixed]

> That’s principal level aligning divs.

Should be added to "The Evolution of a Programmer"[0]

[0] https://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer...