[cedws]

I'm confused. I had the same initial reaction as you and then read further and it sounds like the image was actually provided by a client?

    > The problematic user image had an astonishing 272 layers, each representing a commit operation.

[stackskipton]

This sounds like a case of "We are in growth mode and will accept any garbage the customer will throw at us" without calculating the tech debt costs.

As someone who is currently there, it's very frustrating place.

[move-on-by]

Oh just wait till it’s time for your company to stop the ‘growth mode’ shenanigans and get serious about acceptable levels of tech debt and feature bloat. It’s where we are.

You can’t just flip a switch. There is no “Hey, that was fun, but it’s time to start designing these things with a purpose and vision”. Beyond the totally unreasonable expectations that have been set by Product and C-level- you still have the mountain of tech debt that is coming due and changes slow to a crawl or outages skyrocket or both. Plus, hiring has been based on ‘getting things done’, so you have this group of people who are actually really skilled in hacking things together and getting it out the door. It’s tough and calls for an entire culture shift. How do you stop being a reactionary startup and become vision-based and purposeful organization?

[Atreiden]

This is the job of tech leadership IMO. People respond to incentive changes. If these items are properly prioritized on the roadmap, and credit and recognition follows tech debt remediation efforts to a similar degree as feature delivery, the work can be done.

But this requires strong tech leadership who can interface well with the C Suite and get buy-in for delaying in feature delivery. In the absence of this buy-in, you pretty much need to control the narrative and create a rogue skunkworks initiative to wrap these improvements _into_ the feature delivery.

Many companies don't have strong tech leadership though, and will perpetually churn VPs and Directors, forever chasing A Change without addressing the culture and incentive system that created that culture.