It’s a rarity because the nano second a prototype works, it never gets touched again because management only heard it works and don’t give dev more times to make it proper.
So imagine management deciding to ask devs to go back and clean-up a codebase, pure fantasy.
Wish granted. Now management questions why everything “takes you so long”, and you were passed up for promotion in order to promote Jim (just last week, he did a presentation about his new feature that uses fancyAssDB).
Don’t worry, though. They’ll need your help soon, in order to make Jim’s fancyAssDB pet project sync with the oldAssDB legacy server (which is a completely different User/id structure. TBH might need to refactor most of Jim’s code to fit. Have fun extending all of Jim’s hardcoded features). He quit the company to join a crypto startup. Still no promotion though, since you finish stuff kinda slow (I mean, Jim built it in 2 weeks, so it can’t be too complicated).
EDIT:
So now I hear you thinking “well at some point, they’ll notice how much better my code works, and that features are much easier to integrate”.
But don’t worry, because the next month, your manager will be promoted to head of a new department and forget you exist. Meanwhile, the new head of your department doesn’t know you, and is thinking of promoting Frank.
While you were fixing Jim’s code, Frank added some features to your old project using fancyAssLib3 to save some time. He’s doing a presentation on it tomorrow, and management is very interested, because they haven’t heard about this code yet. It’s Frank’s codebase, right? I mean, he’s doing a presentation on it.
Nope. It’s the norm. Well maintained code is a rarity.
It’s a rarity because the nano second a prototype works, it never gets touched again because management only heard it works and don’t give dev more times to make it proper.
So imagine management deciding to ask devs to go back and clean-up a codebase, pure fantasy.
So just don’t tell “management” it’s done. Easy.
Wish granted. Now management questions why everything “takes you so long”, and you were passed up for promotion in order to promote Jim (just last week, he did a presentation about his new feature that uses fancyAssDB).
Don’t worry, though. They’ll need your help soon, in order to make Jim’s fancyAssDB pet project sync with the oldAssDB legacy server (which is a completely different User/id structure. TBH might need to refactor most of Jim’s code to fit. Have fun extending all of Jim’s hardcoded features). He quit the company to join a crypto startup. Still no promotion though, since you finish stuff kinda slow (I mean, Jim built it in 2 weeks, so it can’t be too complicated).
EDIT:
So now I hear you thinking “well at some point, they’ll notice how much better my code works, and that features are much easier to integrate”.
But don’t worry, because the next month, your manager will be promoted to head of a new department and forget you exist. Meanwhile, the new head of your department doesn’t know you, and is thinking of promoting Frank.
While you were fixing Jim’s code, Frank added some features to your old project using fancyAssLib3 to save some time. He’s doing a presentation on it tomorrow, and management is very interested, because they haven’t heard about this code yet. It’s Frank’s codebase, right? I mean, he’s doing a presentation on it.
I try to do that as much as possible, but comes a point where you can’t push back the task in the next sprint.