"Tech debt and code smell are real"
I think what I struggle most with is that often times there's a valid business reason to "just ship it ASAP", but the missing piece is the accountability around the conditions attached to that. Like, okay, if we don't want to fix this now because it needs to be in the next release then we can merge it as-is, but you can't document this externally, it can't because part of an API, and there can't be any further development in this direction until X, Y, and Z have been rewritten to be in like with ABC.
I find it profoundly hard to get buy-in for those types of discussions. Everyone is happy to smile and nod and the appropriate tickets are filed with deadlines attached, but then the next release rolls around and there's new business-imperative stuff that's the focus and the cleanup tickets are quietly moved to backlog with the deadlines removed.
Seeing this repeated over a number of years has left me with kind of a cynicism about the process, where it feels like code review is at least partly an exercise in frustration; I don't have the backing required to insist on doing it right upfront, so instead I'm really just getting a preview of what is going to land in my lap a year or two from now.
I think what I struggle most with is that often times there's a valid business reason to "just ship it ASAP", but the missing piece is the accountability around the conditions attached to that. Like, okay, if we don't want to fix this now because it needs to be in the next release then we can merge it as-is, but you can't document this externally, it can't because part of an API, and there can't be any further development in this direction until X, Y, and Z have been rewritten to be in like with ABC.
I find it profoundly hard to get buy-in for those types of discussions. Everyone is happy to smile and nod and the appropriate tickets are filed with deadlines attached, but then the next release rolls around and there's new business-imperative stuff that's the focus and the cleanup tickets are quietly moved to backlog with the deadlines removed.
Seeing this repeated over a number of years has left me with kind of a cynicism about the process, where it feels like code review is at least partly an exercise in frustration; I don't have the backing required to insist on doing it right upfront, so instead I'm really just getting a preview of what is going to land in my lap a year or two from now.