[aleph_minus_one]

> A - they are replaceable and their work isn't that unique and B - they are the bottleneck, not the process or workload.

The problem rather is: often good programmers have quite good ideas how these problems could be solved, but for "organizational politics" reasons they are not allowed to apply these solutions.

Thus:

Concerning (B): Because they are not allowed to apply their improvement ideas, they are the bottleneck. But being the bottleneck is not the root problem, but rather a consequence of not being allowed to improve things.

Concerning (A): It is indeed often the case that if you simply let someone else do the work, the code quality decreases a lot and in subtle ways. Good programmers are very sensitive (and sometimes vocal) with respect to that - in opposite to managers.

[tempaccount5050]

And I totally respect that, I get it, I really do. But it's really obvious when people are being territorial and any contractor will tell you this happens every time. I suspect that a lot of the times, I'm hired to "teach them a lesson" in that "Hey, velocity sucks and I'm hearing a lot of whining, so if you don't like doing it, this guy will" and people snap into shape.

[skydhash]

Unless the team are seriously bad developers, many times, it’s the manager fault. As a hired consultant, you often benefit many freedom that team is lacking. As someone that has been hired as a consultant, one of those are meetings and not having to worry about office politics.

[matwood]

I love how everyone is blaming management and if they only listened to the programmer(s) everything would be fixed.

I’ve been on all sides of this coin, and there is plenty of blame, misunderstanding, and bad ideas to go around.

[bonesss]

Additionally on A: the people who will be stuck maintaining this contribution for years and years have a different view of the pain.

Pushing a 90% solution through is a ‘win’ for the coder who is leaving, and hurts everyone on a continuing basis. It’s bad accounting, and lets the consultant look good for making the team perform worse (and look bad later).

And, IME, if that 90% solution needs a 100% rewrite after 40-80% burn in bugs and error chasing? What once was a bit behind is now way behind with staffing issues. Sunk costs don’t create extra budget.

Do It Right The First Time doesn’t always apply, only mostly always. Some people are insecure and territorial, yeah, but some know what their job is.

[ftmootnomoat]

No matter what you do, entrenched engineers will make SURE they will be the only ones maintaining everything until their retirement, because they will make life impossible for everybody else until they leave.

Entrenched engineers don’t want to you to alleviate or god forbid share the pain. Pain is good for employment security. And if the ship goes down, they’ll make sure they’re the last one to get fired, because there’s nothing the entrenched engineer fears more than having to job hunt.