This is a good mind set to cultivate, but then I remember working on non-legacy projects.
My current project was started in the middle of 2021. The same people have been working on it for 6 months. I've been working on a related project and shifted over at the beginning of the year. I know the constraints and there haven't been deadlines.
The staff engineer decided to pick technology by what's cool. They haven't invested in development workflows. The infrastructure is held together manually by those who have admin access. Subsystems that need to communicate don't.
I have much sympathy for legacy projects, but those projects got to where they are because people made poor decisions. My current project is well on it's way to being a legacy project in just 6 months.
The team I'm on today doesn't say no to requirements and scope creep. They are too invested in tech and aren't adjusting. They don't cultivate truth about how parts of the project aren't coming together.
I blame problems on leadership much more than I do on individual contributors. I wish the commit log included the tech lead and managers on the project when code was written.
This field is growing so quickly the ratio of experienced to new devs is out of balance. It takes a critical mass of experienced devs on a team or in an org or the scenario you're in is the default.
And even that critical mass won't be enough if leadership implicitly or explicitly reward shiny visible progress and ignores structural work and integrity.
The experiences we've probably all seen of new buildings going up quickly and then looking like trash just a couple years later are great examples. The problem is that approach "works" during boom years because everyone can move on fast enough to make the problem someone else's.
My current project was started in the middle of 2021. The same people have been working on it for 6 months. I've been working on a related project and shifted over at the beginning of the year. I know the constraints and there haven't been deadlines.
The staff engineer decided to pick technology by what's cool. They haven't invested in development workflows. The infrastructure is held together manually by those who have admin access. Subsystems that need to communicate don't.
I have much sympathy for legacy projects, but those projects got to where they are because people made poor decisions. My current project is well on it's way to being a legacy project in just 6 months.
The team I'm on today doesn't say no to requirements and scope creep. They are too invested in tech and aren't adjusting. They don't cultivate truth about how parts of the project aren't coming together.
I blame problems on leadership much more than I do on individual contributors. I wish the commit log included the tech lead and managers on the project when code was written.