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Re:Why software ends up complex by arbaal on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:22AM (#25407614)
Funny that I'm nobody again. I work for a big german retailer. A big part of my work includes simplifying and refactoring code, so that we have lower maintenance cost and can move faster as a organisation unit. This was also a big factor in my last promotion.

We also increased profit by lowering our runtime cost by some of those optimizations.

Re:Why software ends up complex by senko on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:27AM (#25407671)
If I were a betting man, I would bet that the main reason why you're allowed to do that is because you lowered runtime costs by some of those optimizations, not because of the cleaner code you can move faster.
Re:Why software ends up complex by ThePadawan on Sunday December 13, 2020 @01:21PM (#25408723)
? not parent, but I am really surprised by that mindset.

A large part of my career has been telling my boss "we should invest 5h of cleanup time here to make sure that in the future we won't have those 5h worth of obstacles here before building a new feature on top of it".

In industries where requirements change on a weekly or monthly basis, agility is worth a lot.

Re:Why software ends up complex by senko on Monday December 14, 2020 @08:16AM (#25417114)
I completely agree. My bet would be the bosses usually don't. So in a lot of places you need another "excuse" (or as another poster mentioned, spend the time saved to invest more into maintainability but cover it up).
Re:Why software ends up complex by Aeolun on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:37AM (#25407748)
You can trade on previous achievements to spend time improving your codebase (unless you have a micromanager that tracks every hour).