The Danger of Ill-judged Decision-making in Software Engineering
Photo by Octavian Dan on Unsplash
The Secret Developer has some general advice to share in today’s blog post. It’s about the consequences of making quick decisions that your technical team can be stuck with for months and years to come.
“I know software development can be a fraught place. We can make quick decisions that we are on the hook for in the coming months and years. Here’s how to make better choices and make sure that we think about what we are doing before the disasters happen.
This applies to you whether you’re a web developer loser or a C++ loser. ”
The Simple Solution Isn’t Always The Best
There is often a temptation for senior developers and tech leads to make quick decisions.
“I think sometimes tech management wants to spice things up. They want to hit the button to self-destruct.
In one case I had a boss who joined our team and decided the code wasn’t up to standard. Not up to snuff and they didn’t like it. They had a chat with a friend they’d never met on X/Twitter and decided that they should be able to do the most relevant thing when they see code they don’t like.
They said that they wanted to delete the whole project and start again, irrespective of the fact that even saying this would offend the team who had worked hard on the project.
The ill-judged decision here isn’t deleting the project (that never happened) rather it was about letting the team know that you don’t respect their work. The simple solution here is about killing team spirit.”
Team spirit is something you’d think would be at the heart of a tech lead’s job.
“I’m not saying this should happen in all cases but when you join a new team there will be legacy code. Getting rid of it is seldom the right strategy. Telling the team you’re getting rid of it probably isn’t the right strategy if you don’t follow through with the deletion.”
The Simple Solution Isn’t Always The Best II
People in our company seem to be constantly unable to log into their machines to be able to work. It’s a perennial problem as security battles ease of use for developers.
“Imagine one day you try to log in. Your account is deactivated because you’ve worked there for 6 months. Essentially the company thinks that if you’re still with the company after six months something has gone wrong.
It’s a simple solution to make sure that we don’t have anyone who shouldn’t be able to access the systems isn’t able to get in.
It’s a shame we lose about 10 man-days each month to this, but at least it’s a simple solution to the problem of security.
I’d say it’s the wrong solution and I think most software developers are with me on this. That’s without going into the detail that you need to email the credentials to someone who is locked out but that’s another err0r entirely.”
I know what you’re thinking
Ill-judged decision making? I know what you’re thinking about — it’s Elon Musk and his hardcore software developers, right?
“I think that is a great example of ill-judged decision-making. It’s not great on any level. Think about what you’re doing before you go all in.”
Conclusion
“I think the solution to being a great software developer is to stop implementing misguided solutions. But that’s another story entirely.”