
Ask HN: How can you tell if a company prioritizes maintainability over delivery? - 100721
Specifically with respect to software development.<p>The title should probably read &quot;_faster_ delivery&quot;.<p>I am currently in the gaping maw of chaos at my second development job of my career, and I see so many opportunities to clean things up and improve readability. Maybe I am just a naive Jr. Dev, but I prefer things to be as simple as possible – even if it means more lines of code, or comments explaining the business logic (ie what it _should_ do) instead of relying on external Jira tickets.<p>How do you go about bringing this up in the interview process?
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drallison
Sometimes you just have to look at the hardware product. A company which
solders in batteries, for example, is probably not big on maintainability.
Likewise, it it takes a special tool to gain access, it's likely not been
designed by maintainability motivated engineers. For software it's a little
harder. I think having fewer options, fewer knobs, and a simpler intuitive
structure is an indicator of a bias towards maintainability. Also, not having
source is a definite barrier to maintainability.

BTW, I find it hard to believe that "_faster_delivery" and maintainability are
in opposition. Most of us would agree that maintainable systems have fewer
bugs at every stage. And experience has taught us that bugs, particularly
subtle bugs, take a long time to find and correct.

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verdverm
Listen to middle management / product managers and how they talk about goals,
task priority, and solutions to customer problems

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sarcasmatwork
aka "Technical debt"

Get use to it, it exists in most companies. You could ask if technical debt
(backlog) is actively being worked on is there a plan/vision to chip away at
it etc.

