alt Hacker NewsThis is what usually happens if you let incompetent people make design decision: they stay with the first and worst version forever.
Right now I'm in the process of leaving a company where this happened over and over again. The company's product and design aspects were always neglected in this specific way: whenever a problem was discovered its solution was assigned to whoever would write the code to solve it. That's it. The QA would be notified a week or two before the release and after the solution was "finished". The QA would then not be allowed to even comment on the overall design, only the superficial bug reports were allowed to go through.
Needless to say the product's code-base is a dumpster. The morale is low because it's a daunting task to deal with this dumpster on a daily basis. Now, even if you wanted to, you wouldn't have a budget to fix the previous design mistakes because of the layers of more mistakes that were added on top of them due to the low morale and lack of budget / lack of procedure for making better design decisions. The only thing that keeps the product afloat is its uniqueness in a rather niche field and the backing of a large company that acquired it, but doesn't really depend on it and has no time for a thorough audit.
Replies
I would have assumed code reviews would have sussed out those issues earlier in the cycle?
> This is what usually happens if you let incompetent people make design decision: they stay with the first and worst version forever.
This is what usually happens when you confuse the decisions that mattered from the ones that didn't. It's like back before 'just use a linter' was the solution to code formatting. You'd start a project, you'd have the 'code style meeting' and everyone would bash themselves into the rocks of whitespace and bracket placement, and never get to things like code organization, structure, and naming of things.
So then you end up with code that uses the same noun in three places to mean 3 different things and uses it as a verb in a fourth.
You only get so many opportunities to really change the direction the boat is steering and you can wear out your welcome trying to exceed it. If you get some things right they'll let you do a few more.