Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake (2020)

Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by grepfru_it on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:25AM (#28086824)

I hear you, but this problem becomes exponentially harder as your engineering org grows.

I witness on a daily basis PRs that have no body getting merged with absolutely zero comments and a blanket approval as long as it passes our (broken) CI pipeline. I witness obvious poor quality in the code, but engineers want to seem like they are working and will just blanket approve PRs, while i'm in the middle of writing up my code review denying the PR.

If you are a developer on a team and want your codebase to be high quality, you end up no longer writing the code and instead spend all of your time gatekeeping via code reviews. This leads to burn out.

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by gkrimer on Friday August 06, 2021 @08:54PM (#28094616)

Please come work at Google! This place has the best overall code quality I have ever seen. That's not to say it's always great or bug-free, but it is almost always well maintained. There is very little dead code. Giving and receiving high-quality code reviews is the norm.

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by ChrisMarshallNY on Friday August 06, 2021 @10:09PM (#28095055)

That’s one company that would almost certainly not have me, but I very much appreciate the thought.

Apple also displays extremely high quality code, in the areas that are exposed to the public.

I have not seen too much Adobe code, but I’m told you can eat off the Photoshop codebase.

For myself, I need to keep my scope fairly humble, but I get great joy from it.

It sounds like a gratifying environment. Good show!

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by grepfru_it on Friday August 06, 2021 @11:19PM (#28095385)

Hey, I found your email on another thread.. I will reach out!

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by ChrisMarshallNY on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:30AM (#28086888)

Yeah. It can be a real challenge, ensuring quality on a team.

The obvious answer, is to hire experienced, skilled, capable engineers, and instill in them, the same reverence for Quality that you have.

Like I said, Quality is expensive. Very few companies like to pay the premium.

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by grepfru_it on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:58AM (#28087236)

This does not work at scale. My company does pay the premium and a lot more.

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Re:Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroy... by ChrisMarshallNY on Friday August 06, 2021 @10:06AM (#28087316)

It does, but it ain't easy. I worked for a company that did it at scale.

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