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by hombre_fatal 43 days ago
On the other hand, most issues rot due to process overhead, not because the ticket is hard.

For example, why are you working on a four-year-old issue, and a trivial one at that, when you're already behind schedule on the tasks assigned to you? Now someone else who has their own things to get done has to review it? And even trivial changes can be annoying to truly review beyond a blind LGTM.

Just one of the many ways that pressure builds against the utopia of burning through old tickets.

Aside, watch out for the double standard we have for AI on forums like this. AI is expected to be so good that it can magically overcome the forces that keep engineers from working on old tickets (which were never related to engineer productivity) and, when AI can't, well of course it couldn't because AI sucks.
2 comments
duxup 43 days ago
And who knows the fix to some of these issues might be a hell of a lot more worked now that the bug has been baked in and the "real" fix is herculean now.
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hombre_fatal 43 days ago
Good point. Related: a lot of what seem like simple tickets require a real conversation about "well, how should this work?"
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darkwater 43 days ago
Yes, there are plenty of those tickets in GitLab public tracker, for example the "Allow defining scheduled pipelines triggers as yaml" [1] one is a good example. But still, it's a 6 year old ticket that has been clearly shuffled around with nobody taking full ownership of it, probably because it was never deemed important by higher level product management.

And this is for a "feature" and it's the first that came into my mind for $REASON, but there are similar tickets for very annoying bugs.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/296630

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duxup 43 days ago
That’s been my last couple months. “Yes this is a bug / not optimal, but all the imagined paths / solutions are not great or a mountain of new code / requirements …”
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smeggysmeg 42 days ago
This is it, exactly. In any org, current management only cares about you working on their ideas. If they thought up the project, then they get the credit for it. Customer ideas, and old ones at that, don't get leaders credit.

Basically, every organization is constantly rotting due to the cliqueish behavior of leadership.

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