It seems to me what we want is some kind of "Platonic ideal" where the extremes are bad for development:
Management won't give us time to deal with technical debt/incorporate best practices.
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THE IDEAL
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Management wants the Hot New Thing all the time. uservices are the state-of-the-art in best practices so uservices it is!
I somehow suspect it won't work. The problem with those at the top is that they see the dev's proposition as an investment that will either not bear fruit or, worse, slow the team down; so they are incentivized to keep status quo. Those at the bottom, however, start from a perspective that their idea will add value to the team so they keep pushing for it no matter what. And telling them "Let's not do what Google does; we're not Google" is definitely seen as a devaluation of the team.
This has been a weird headspace to explore. I'd love to hear from others' experience on dealing with this.
Management that don't really understand tech and is afraid to try things
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THE IDEAL
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Management that don't really understand business (and sometimes tech too) and is focused on tech fashion
The difficulty of working on lower abstraction layers doesn't scale with the amount of higher layers. Unlike with buildings or bridges, there's no gravity in software, no loads and stresses that need to be collected and routed through foundations and into the ground, or balanced out at the core. In software, you can just redo the foundation, and usually it only affects things immediately connected to it.
A set of analogies for software that are better than civil engineering:
- Assembling puzzles.
- Painting.
- Working on a car that's been cut in half through the middle along its symmetry plane.
- Working on buildings and bridges as a Matrix Lord who lives in the 4th dimension.
All these examples share a crucial characteristic also shared by software: your view into it and construction work is being done in a dimension orthogonal to the dimension along which the artifact does its work. You can see and access (and modify, and replace) any part of it at any time.
I mean it'll only take them an hour or two to write it up, better to spend that than the 20 hours it would take you (for example) to spin up a new stack.
I'm in a weird situation where I'm contracting into one organisation and they've contracted me out to another. The first organisation know me as a senior dev/architect with 15 years experience in a niche domain. The second organisation see me as brand new to them and despite paying an embarrassing day rate are giving me noddy UI tweaks to do. Extracting myself is proving to be slow somehow.
Anyway, they wanted a webapp with a couple of APIs and nothing on the page than a button, the authenticated username and a line of text. Clicking the button opts you in/out of a service and the text changes depending on the state. The sort of thing people go to once, maybe twice.
I used a mustache template on the server side to populate the values and I didn't even bother with any javascript, just did an old school form submission to the API when the button was clicked and a redirect back to the page.
It was tiny but, obviously it was decided "we should be using a more modern framework" - code for React. It was the more word that got to me, as if there was an equivalent, dated framework I'd used. I didn't put up a fight partly because I was new to the team and figured they were hot on React and I wasn't. Somehow, they made a complete hash of it, they couldn't even figure out how to get all their inline styles (the only styles they used) working without help.
I guess it's just those classics; people want to learn the hot new thing as they see it, their managers are happy that they've heard a buzzword they recognise and then everything becomes a nail for their new hammer.