Every time I look back at old stuff, I have to remind myself of the relative importance of getting it done, vs getting it perfect, at the time.
Inevitably, there were no clear requirements at the outset, or if there were they were vastly outnumbered by additional requirements that scope-crept their way into the project. The project was “due” before I was asked to help / landed with the whole thing to do myself. The project was under-estimated and is now “on the critical path” for a larger initiative. Other interested parties are too busy to meet during definition time, but all too willing to point out missing scope after a “finished solution” is presented.
Yeah, I used to be in the medical device industry. Once shipped, an update typically meant a patient needed additional surgery because of your mistake. That really emphasized the “unless absolutely necessary” part of your statement.
Not just in implantables, though implantables have that whole additional surgical risk aspect, but all medical devices have painful piles of paperwork required for each revision. They’re trying to lighten the load for “security patches” but so far it’s still a major pain. I suspect it’s the much the same in avionics and any other industry that requires documented validation against traceable requirements and all that jazz.
Oh yeah… I once had a project to change a 0 to a 1 in a file on a machine used to manufacture devices. Basically operator had to align crosshairs over a certain point before starting. At 4 of the systems the operator could just touch the screen at the point and go. At one they had to push x+ or x- or y+ or y- repeatedly to line it up because the configuration had a 0 in the option “Click To Align”… It took 8 months to validate changing that to be 1
Do you know the cost to change the color on a box? Just the color, not the text, not the information, just the color?
Estimate:
$470,000
No scrap cost, old color boxes used until stock depleted.
Vendor didn’t charge us anything to change the color on the next and subsequent lots.
All that was engineering hours for the document revisions, meetings to support document changes, training, recording of documents, first article inspections, etc.
Progressing is cool, but having 10 yoe and still outputing spaghetti is bad. I am just saying if you care enough about what you are doing you are top 10% already
And as others have noted, how much time you are actually given. PMs and managers don’t know or care about code quality, they just want something to work NOW
And there is never time to maintain the code, because each project only want to add more feature/s which makes the spaghetti code even worse.
In my group we had a golden opportunity to fix all old mistakes but no, we (decided by PO and group manager) needed to spend all time on proof of concepts that will go to production at earliest in 5 years. Now that opportunity is gone and we are crunching in order to meet the deadlines instead. Still with bad code quality of course.
The worst programmer I ever met was myself 6 months ago…
Every time I look back at old stuff, I have to remind myself of the relative importance of getting it done, vs getting it perfect, at the time.
Inevitably, there were no clear requirements at the outset, or if there were they were vastly outnumbered by additional requirements that scope-crept their way into the project. The project was “due” before I was asked to help / landed with the whole thing to do myself. The project was under-estimated and is now “on the critical path” for a larger initiative. Other interested parties are too busy to meet during definition time, but all too willing to point out missing scope after a “finished solution” is presented.
Yeah, me from the past… not a fair reflection.
True all that plays a part.
And the real thing, in our industry, once it is verified and validated and shipped - you don’t touch it unless absolutely necessary.
Yeah, I used to be in the medical device industry. Once shipped, an update typically meant a patient needed additional surgery because of your mistake. That really emphasized the “unless absolutely necessary” part of your statement.
Not just in implantables, though implantables have that whole additional surgical risk aspect, but all medical devices have painful piles of paperwork required for each revision. They’re trying to lighten the load for “security patches” but so far it’s still a major pain. I suspect it’s the much the same in avionics and any other industry that requires documented validation against traceable requirements and all that jazz.
Oh yeah… I once had a project to change a 0 to a 1 in a file on a machine used to manufacture devices. Basically operator had to align crosshairs over a certain point before starting. At 4 of the systems the operator could just touch the screen at the point and go. At one they had to push x+ or x- or y+ or y- repeatedly to line it up because the configuration had a 0 in the option “Click To Align”… It took 8 months to validate changing that to be 1
Do you know the cost to change the color on a box? Just the color, not the text, not the information, just the color?
Estimate:
$470,000
No scrap cost, old color boxes used until stock depleted.
Vendor didn’t charge us anything to change the color on the next and subsequent lots.
All that was engineering hours for the document revisions, meetings to support document changes, training, recording of documents, first article inspections, etc.
Progressing is cool, but having 10 yoe and still outputing spaghetti is bad. I am just saying if you care enough about what you are doing you are top 10% already
the quality of the code is dependent on the quality of the pay. lol
And as others have noted, how much time you are actually given. PMs and managers don’t know or care about code quality, they just want something to work NOW
And there is never time to maintain the code, because each project only want to add more feature/s which makes the spaghetti code even worse.
In my group we had a golden opportunity to fix all old mistakes but no, we (decided by PO and group manager) needed to spend all time on proof of concepts that will go to production at earliest in 5 years. Now that opportunity is gone and we are crunching in order to meet the deadlines instead. Still with bad code quality of course.