> If they think there's an oppurtunity to improve the developer experience at the cost of complexity, they'll try it and see what it looks like
IME this fails most of the time. Perception of complexity varies across the team. A proactive developer pushing for a new shiny thing is unable to properly recognize complexity of his solution because he is the most familiar with his solution. Familiarity changes perception of complexity.
A lot of developers have a catastrophic combination of being non-confrontational and having impostor syndrome, so when then new shiny thing gets enforced upon them they are unable to push back. They don't like it, but they think it's their fault, so they keep silent.
> "Good" boring code bases in my experience are flexible but tedious
It is true, but I taught myself to love that tediousness and I absolutely love it. I treat it as enlightenment. I write way less code, but ship way more value.
It's really sad that most engineers are excited by solving their own problems, not by solving customer problems. Talk about misaligned incentives.
We even rank companies based on how much fun they allow us to have, not by how much impact they are allowing us to have. I've heard numerous stories about folks at Google not being able to ship to production for months, but still praising their tech stack. To me that's just insane.
> Getting buy-in for refactoring is a huge effort because everyone argues "complexity is evil"
That's strange. In my world most of the refactorings are aimed to reduce complexity, not increase it.
IME this fails most of the time. Perception of complexity varies across the team. A proactive developer pushing for a new shiny thing is unable to properly recognize complexity of his solution because he is the most familiar with his solution. Familiarity changes perception of complexity.
A lot of developers have a catastrophic combination of being non-confrontational and having impostor syndrome, so when then new shiny thing gets enforced upon them they are unable to push back. They don't like it, but they think it's their fault, so they keep silent.
> "Good" boring code bases in my experience are flexible but tedious
It is true, but I taught myself to love that tediousness and I absolutely love it. I treat it as enlightenment. I write way less code, but ship way more value.
It's really sad that most engineers are excited by solving their own problems, not by solving customer problems. Talk about misaligned incentives.
We even rank companies based on how much fun they allow us to have, not by how much impact they are allowing us to have. I've heard numerous stories about folks at Google not being able to ship to production for months, but still praising their tech stack. To me that's just insane.
> Getting buy-in for refactoring is a huge effort because everyone argues "complexity is evil"
That's strange. In my world most of the refactorings are aimed to reduce complexity, not increase it.