Your Engineers Aren't Lazy, Your Codebase Is Punishing Them
(piechowski.io)
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 31 Mar 11:19
https://programming.dev/post/48064950
from codeinabox@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev on 31 Mar 11:19
https://programming.dev/post/48064950
A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
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“Codebase drag” formerly known as “technical debt”.
Oh hey, next sprint we’re going to work on that!
Oh, there’s a feauture request from sales you say? Hard due date of Thursday? But that’s a really big feature we can’t just… okay fine, but the next sprint we’re need to work on tech debt.
Last place I worked we were promised a sprint where all we would do is tech debt fixes. Guess what never happened since the top brass kept pushing new feature requests on us. Features kept taking longer and longer to implement and every release we had more and more bugs make it into production.
Well, yeah - that never happens. You do tech debt cleanup “as you go”. Slip in a few tickets to cleanup specific things and have a policy to update code that is touched when adding features / fixing bugs.
It needs to be a continual cleaning process. That’s why it’s called debt - the longer you let it go un-paid the harder it is to do.
When developing code for first release, we had a dedicated HIP Sprint (Hardening, Innovation, Planning) and we had the most productive team in the company. Other teams were struggling cause they were just using the HIP as another Sprint. So what did we do? Got rid of the HIP, naturally. You see, some teams weren’t using it and it’s unfair to those teams that we’re not doing work when they are. Now everyone’s suffering!
Also had legitimate agile practices (budgets are for HR, work on what you need to work on and let someone else worry about paying for it) and we were the most productive team in the company. So, naturally, they need to get a bunch of C-suite guys to come over and run things cause it would be really embarrassing for them if they weren’t involved in the new hotness. Naturally, though, we gotta go back to funding buckets, cause those c-suite guys don’t understand why they got to talk to the developers when they want something fixed instead of handing things down from on high. Oh no! Suddenly all these issues are popping up in the workflow, guess we gotta force in ai to fix the problems.
Why would you ask permission to do something necessary? Just do it any time you have a ticket in the area.
One place I worked at had a rule forbidding pure refactors. One, it’s no other department’s (or manager’s) business that you massaged something to be more useful. Two, what is QA supposed to do with a change that has no new features or bug fixes? Three, are you going to put “refactor” in your release notes?
Why do engineers do this?
Simply fix the relevant technical debt as part of implementing a feature or fixing a bug. That way you can chip away at it over time.
Waiting for the big removal of technical debt will never come. It’s an ongoing process.
Leave the code base better than you found it – always.
The answer is to say “We will try our best, but this is very ambitious.” Then you let the deadline pass, usually it’s artificial in the first place. When the deadline passes say: “As we feared this took longer than we hoped for.”
If there’s some urgent feature request coming from sales then that means the Thursday deadline is in the contract and it’s already signed.
So what? If you weren’t consulted when the deadline was set, it’s not your problem. Have some balls and rip your bosses a new one when they pull bullshit like this. “That deadline was unattainable when it was set. Had our team been consulted, we could’ve worked on a solution. But since sales went over our heads, this is their mess to clean up.”
You don’t with in software do you? The software guy always gets blamed anyway.
To quote my manager from today: “I don’t want us to spin our wheels and turn this into a month long effort”
The request is to effectively rearchitect a foundational part of the system. It’s a large lift project that should take weeks.
Of course I pushed back, I have good rapport with him and I’m not worried about getting fired over this. Not everyone has that.
“This isn’t a bazaar. We don’t haggle over deadlines. We professionally estimate them.”
Nevermind, it does sound like you work in software. This is a very familiar quote. x.x And it always comes right before planning slows to a crawl.
I’ve never heard the phrase “We professionally estimate deadlines”, but I’m gonna start using it. Thanks for that little nugget!
As the tech lead at my company, I treat all deadlines as fake meetings until proven otherwise.
Also, when they start pressing me for dates that things can be done, I start multiplying by 4…
Multiplying by Pi is what I do. :)
Not sure. Something can be written fine and technically good but it’s difficult to get started in… Its a headwind… Ie drag.
I don’t see that as debt?
Anything that makes the codebase harder to maintain than it should be is technical debt.
Whilst true, I was not talking about maintenance…
Rather “getting started in” ie onboarding.
Relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2138/
I’m fully talking out of my ass here, but I feel like a quick “five whys” exercise at any given company would reveal that the real issue is neither engineers nor code, but rather something systemic.
It’s usually because the engineers were rushed to deliver completely new features because the sales department over promised again.
It is almost always that.
Dysfunctional engineering teams, that have no empathy for end users is an issue as well.
Conway’s Law
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/6d40e404-d26a-4f89-a2f3-42a906832020.jpeg">
I find most bad codebases exist because of a culture that isn’t focused on quality, and I’m not talking about bug counts or code coverage. Clean codebases stay clean by being proactive about keeping them clean. This should include meticulous peer reviews, establishing design patterns, enforcing best practices, and taking initiative to leave things better than you found them (we used to call that boy scouting).
If your teams PR comments only contain LGTM, and the average time spent reviewing them is 5 minutes, your team isn’t focused on quality. If a PR contains more files than an average person can keep in their mental context window, it won’t get the attention it needs to be properly reviewed. If there is no accountability to keep a clean codebase, you’ll end up with 2 hours of work taking 5 days to complete.
The signal-to-noise ratio of reviews is nearly zero in my experience. It’s for the least productive people on the team to argue about spaces or gotos or grind other ideological axes.
I find PRs really dumb things down, but not in a way that makes code more understandable. And it certainly doesn’t improve quality.
A good alternative is code presentations.
You present your changes to a group of engineers. Then discuss it.
Yes, it happens too often. That’s a failure of leadership or a social problem.
Techies often try and fix human and social issues with technology, but that doesn’t always work.
Code review helps spread knowledge about the code base through the team. Without it, you easily end up with disjointed fiefdoms ruled by petty code lords that don’t share information.
I mean, what we have now is a clique of ideologically-aligned people who insta-approve bad PRs outside their domain and ignore or jam-up the PRs of people outside their clique.
You can say it’s a failure of management, but this is the primary tool used by the ideologues. And I’ve seen it used so at various places.
What I haven’t seen is a real dissemination of knowledge about the code. At least not above and beyond looking at the code and using blame to see the changesets and looking at the associated issues.
This kind of social behavior is corporate politics and a failure of management of course.
Spreading knowledge and context sharing are exactly why I like code reviews. It should also be something done by more than one person so that information is better disseminated throughout the team.
Code presentations are great for that.
One or two people present their code before the merge. Others watch, ask questions, etc. Small changes and improvements can be done immediately. Ideally the change is merged after the presentation. It can speed up things immensely and more people feel ownership. If a simple ticket stays in review for a week, it can be very detrimental.
If your team is only focused on tabs/spaces or soapboxing during code reviews, you have bigger issues to take care of.
That’s an engineering culture problem. Not a PR problem.
And LLM slop coding will make it exponentially worse.
My LLM slop personal projects have better test coverage than many many many professional projects I have had the “pleasure” of working with.