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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if anyone has ever written about the problem with the staff being less committed than the software.

It is easy for me to make some big long-lasting decision about something that gets encoded in software and then I can leave next year and everyone else has to live with that decision.

I don't know how to solve that unless you write software to be hyper-modular and able to be modified without a complete rewrite of everything. Either that or keep it simple, build it quickly and throw it away after 2 years when everything needs to change.

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> I don't know how to solve that unless you write software to be hyper-modular and able to be modified without a complete rewrite of everything.

Isn't this how Salesforce ate the universe?

Some of this comes down to poor management as well. Sometimes it can be so stressful to convince them to do things the proper way, that it's a lot easier to just give them what they want in the short term and then ditching a year later before the bill comes due.

Fast cycles are a good solution for a lot of those problems, but they can also be highly wasteful. There's this tendency to think that "building things" is always a good idea in The Era Of Software, but to me that's like a disposable house or disposable car. It's better to build it to last.

I think the solution is Shift Left, but with really good experienced leads at every level that have a mandate to reject any shit from being merged that will be a maintenance nightmare down the road. That's the only way to be remotely sure that the launch date you've committed to is reasonable, and that you aren't signing yourself up for years of pain trying to claw back all the terrible crap that got merged just to meet the deadline.

What is “Shift Left”?

You should google it, there is a lot of writing on the subject. Suffice to say it is about doing something now once rather than doing it later at twice the cost and time.

I strongly believe this isn't a management issue, nor is it even a technical problem. It's 100% a pay issue.

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