Programmer Humor

Bad PO: "So it will only increase the chance of bugs if we don't do it? There won't necessarily be any. So we can skip it and just put the feature in."

I hope you have a good PO who is on the same page as you, but to a bad PO, it still sounds optional.

A civil engineer doesn't say "If we don't put supports there's a chance the ceiling will fall in and people may die," because history has shown there are plenty of unscrupulous project managers who are quite willing to take construction risks, even with people's lives. As a result of this there are now plenty of laws in construction, and a civil engineer has a convenient fallback of saying "If we don't put supports it won't pass inspection, and we won't get paid."

Everyone wants to get paid.

In software we don't have many laws we can fall back on to justify our work, but we can still treat our tech debt and refactoring as if it's equally mandatory.

"To add feature x, we need to resolve problem y. The feature can't be added until we've completed this prerequisite."

Just build and deploy it! We have the shareholders to think of!

The big difference is a civil/structural engineer has to individually certify a plan sets and take legal responsibility for it. The project manager can't override them.

They can fire them and hire another engineer, but even if they found someone to stamp bad plans for a fee, the original engineer could report the new engineer and have their credentials yanked.

We don't have that in software engineering. And outside of critical software we don't need it. When the audio fucks up in Teams and you have to leave and re-enter the meeting, people don't die.

Counterpoint: tHe ShArEhOlDeRs SaY jUsT sHiP iT

The difference there is that our project manager guy is afraid they're gonna go to prison if they don't let you add those supports and something goes wrong. But for the software dude, building things properly is unfortunately mostly a concern for you and the other software engineers, and mr project manager doesn't have that much of an incentive to let you do that

Sure, then you get outbid by another contractor who is willing to cut corners.

A good project manager understands technical debt.

Edit: moderately good

and the response will invariably be: “Is there a way we can just ship feature x now and fix up the other stuff after?”

It's an abstract analogy but i think it works... When the roof is really needed, it's not possible to fix it because rain / deadline.

When it's sunny, no deadlines, the hole doesn't impede any work, so there's no need to fix it, difficult to convince PM that it needs fixing.

I highly recommend solving the important ones and learning to let the rest go, speaking as someone whose marriage just exploded over exactly that.

Shall we renovate?
Yeah sure, just spend 4 x more to carefully work around the roof hole! Install waterproof furniture! Give out umbrellas to guests!

Well, the PM really needs to understand so, like in excel: yellow background on important cells. This is muscle memory, right ?

Simple. To highlight the hole in his roof.

I suspect the person who made the screenshot searched for something including the words "hole in roof" on Google Books - this style of yellow highlighting looks the same as the highlight auto applied for search terms there

Resolution: Issue solved by applying patch.