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.
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.”
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. :)
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.”
I’ve never heard the phrase “We professionally estimate deadlines”, but I’m gonna start using it. Thanks for that little nugget!
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.