Issues with Software Engineering and Engineers

• Working software is changed unnecessarily for a variety of reasons which lead to broken products, or lower performing (slower/less efficient)

• These reasons can be for non business cases and for superficial reasons

  • For example

    • To try new technologies

    • Boredom

    • Improve something cause it is looks good

    • do something cause it is a challenge

    • change something cause the way it was written was not to your liking or taste

    • rewrites for no gain for the stake holder

    • Forced to use new technologies due to management say so

• A lot of this driven via ego-driven decision-making of team members, including new CEOs, tech leads, or engineering CTOs, who feel the need to make changes to demonstrate their knowledge or expertise.

• This leads to people

  • massaging their egos

  • showing off

  • doing busy work instead of impactful work

  • doing stuff for their resume

  • Wanting to have fun rather doing things for the aim of the business

Solution

• the importance of targeted reasoning and objective observation when making changes to software, focusing on genuine improvements rather than cosmetic changes.

• Use a scientific/engineering approach to making changes that will bring the most benefit short and long term

• Use shared ownership

  • refer to code as ours

  • Avoid you or I, instead use we and us

  • pairing

  • pairing in code reviews

• Psychological safety

  • people who are scared will not take risks or feel confident to do work that is impactful or can be seen to have consequences if it does not work out

  • look to prevent major issues from leaking out from mistakes

    • code review

    • pairing

    • testing in different environments

    • ease of rollbacks or config changes

    • CI/CD pipelines

• On self improvement

  • Dont get too tied up with the code/product

  • humility

  • therapy