zlacker

>>moored+(OP)
And most people problems are communication problems. Engineers aren't engaged with the product vision or the customer base, and are allowed to silo themselves. Product doesn't see the point of engineers being engaged and feed the engineering team like an in-house outsourcing shop. Sales and CS fail to understand the cost of their promises to individual customers to the timelines of features they're hungry for from the product plan. Goals and metrics for success fail to align. And thus everyone rows in their own direction.

The solution usually isn't "better people." It's engaging people on the same goals and making sure each of them knows how their part fits with the others. It's also recognizing when hard stuff is worth doing. Yeah you've got a module with 15 years of tech debt that you didn't create, and no-one on the team is confident in touching anymore. Unlike acne, it won't get better if you don't pick at it. Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates. Balance that against other goals, and find a plan that pays it down at the right time and the right speed.

>>jeffhe+Gs
> Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates

How to do that? Genuine question.

>>_def+du
If it's been around for a while, look at the last year's worth of projects and estimate the total delay caused by the specific piece of tech debt. Go through old Jira tickets etc. and figure out which ones were affected.

You don't need to be anywhere close to exact, it's just helpful to know whether it costs more like 5 hours a year or 5 weeks a year. Then you can prioritize tech debt along with other projects.

>>Satvik+Iv
It takes guts to say “this 1 month feature would be done in a couple days by a competent competitor using modern technology and techniques”, and the legendary “I reimplemented it in <framework> over the weekend” is often not well received.

But - sometimes drastic measures and hurt feeling are needed to break out of a bad attractor. Just be sure you’re OK with leaving the company/org if your play does not succeed.

And know that as the OP describes, it’s a lot about politics. If you convince management that there is a problem, you have severely undermined your technical leadership. Game out how that could unfold! In a small company maybe you can be the new TL, but probably don’t try to unseat the founder/CTO. In a big company you are unlikely to overturn many layers above you of technical leadership.

>>thepti+Qx
> hurt feeling

This is why I incessantly preach to my coworkers: "you are not your job". Do not attach to it emotionally, it's not your child, it's a contraption to solve a puzzle. It should be easy and relieving to scrap it in favor of a better contraption, or of not having to solve the problem at all.

>>nine_k+KH
More importantly, you are not your code.

This is actually harder for more senior/managerial folks, as often they'll build/buy/create something that's big for their level and now they're committed to this particular approach, which can end up being a real problem, particularly in smaller orgs.

Once upon a time, I worked for a lead who got really frustrated with our codebase and decided to re-write it (over the weekends). This person shipped a POC pretty quickly, and got management buy-in but then it turned out that it would take a lot more work to make it work with everything else.

We persevered, and moved over the code (while still hitting the product requirements) over a two year period. As we were finishing the last part, it became apparent that the problem that we now needed to solve was a different one, and all that work turned out to be pointless.