Metadata
- Author: Ludicity
- Full Title:: Get Me Out of Data Hell
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/
- Finished date:: 2024-10-10
Highlights
At two of the four businesses I’ve worked at, the most highly-performing engineers have resorted to something that I think of as Pain Zone navigation. It’s the practice of never working unless pair programming simply to have someone next to you, bolstering your resolve, so that you can gaze upon the horrors of the Pain Zone without immediately losing your mind. (View Highlight)
The fear and dread comes from a culture where people feel bad that they can’t work quickly enough in the terrible codebase, where they feel judged for slowing down to hammer the code into better shapes that sadly aren’t on the Jira board, and where management looks down on people who practice craftsmanship. (View Highlight)
Terrible companies are perpetual cognitohazards where everyone is bullied all day. The median companies (which some people call “good” for lack of ever having seen better) lack the outright bullying but still consist of people that are trying to convince themselves that it’s fine to feel disempowered or subservient all day. (View Highlight)
The issue is raised with the team, but because fixing this critical error in our auditability is not on the board and Velocity Must Be Up, fixing the logs is judged to be less important than… parsing… the nonsense logs. Why? We have another saying on our team, which is “Stop asking questions, you’re only going to hurt yourself”. (View Highlight)
I realize that the organization values things that I don’t value, and it’s as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren’t better, but you know what, my values are better. Having tested code is better. Having comprehensible logs is better. (View Highlight)