Re:Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the ...
by hinkley on Thursday November 29, 2018 @12:47PM
(#18562072)
The first step is admitting you have a problem. If you can’t acknowledge badness as a group then entropy takes over.
I complain/observe about codebases all the time, especially on projects with an SLA. It’s bit like fire code. When the shit hits the fan you [don’t] want people wandering around trying to figure stuff out.
Hallmark of a bad team (project management, really) is if the same three people are required for every emergency.
The interesting thing about complaining is that nobody wants to talk to the optimist about problems. It makes them feel small and stupid.
I find myself in the role of troubleshooter often, because I’m good at it, I acknowledge that the struggle is real, and at the end I try to summarize the experience, and diagnose where they went off the rails.
When you see 20% of the team have the same stumble, the problem isn’t with them. If the stumble was expensive then it needs to be addressed rather than blaming the victim. Nobody wants to talk to someone who shames them, either.
But I don’t believe in the classic rewrite. I believe in prevention and station keeping (don’t let it get that bad). The human brain can only deal with so much. If you want to keep adding to the project you have to keep cleaning old code and improving your practices. Slowly you’ll have a very different codebase, and a team where everyone senior can fix most problems.
I complain/observe about codebases all the time, especially on projects with an SLA. It’s bit like fire code. When the shit hits the fan you [don’t] want people wandering around trying to figure stuff out.
Hallmark of a bad team (project management, really) is if the same three people are required for every emergency.
The interesting thing about complaining is that nobody wants to talk to the optimist about problems. It makes them feel small and stupid.
I find myself in the role of troubleshooter often, because I’m good at it, I acknowledge that the struggle is real, and at the end I try to summarize the experience, and diagnose where they went off the rails.
When you see 20% of the team have the same stumble, the problem isn’t with them. If the stumble was expensive then it needs to be addressed rather than blaming the victim. Nobody wants to talk to someone who shames them, either.
But I don’t believe in the classic rewrite. I believe in prevention and station keeping (don’t let it get that bad). The human brain can only deal with so much. If you want to keep adding to the project you have to keep cleaning old code and improving your practices. Slowly you’ll have a very different codebase, and a team where everyone senior can fix most problems.
Edit: a word