Director: Blue, I need you to work on a patch for the suspension barrier, it seems to have a memory leak.
Blue: I could if I wasn’t allocating so much time to holding together a patchy framework, if I drop it now the whole system will break, what we need to do is re-build the entire thing from scratch in a new entirely blue framework, if we did that we wouldn’t have to allocate so many resources to patch work.
Director: that sounds like it would cost money…
Blue: it would now but in the future it would save us so much more.
Director: couldn’t you just work harder for less pay?
Blue: no I literally couldn’t.
Director: Green seems to be holding it together well.
Blue: that is because Green is at the bottom of the stack, he doesn’t have to deal with it he makes it our problem.
Director: I don’t know, sounds like a skill issue to me, no vacation time until it’s fixed.
The system I’m working on is shit. The devs all know it, the users all complain about it. It needs to be fixed, and not only do I seem to be the person most driven to fix it, it turns out I’ve been hired explicitly to replace the shittiest part of it. So that’s actually pretty good, right?
Except my PO doesn’t quite want me to do that yet. First, he needs me to shovel more shit onto it. Shit that’s going to be the first stuff that I’ll replace once I get to replace stuff, and then that stuff will be a lot easier, whereas now it would be a lot harder and too slow to be useable. But new features are more important than making this useable.
He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t get technical priorities, and priorities are the primary responsibility for a PO.
Director: Blue, I need you to work on a patch for the suspension barrier, it seems to have a memory leak.
Blue: I could if I wasn’t allocating so much time to holding together a patchy framework, if I drop it now the whole system will break, what we need to do is re-build the entire thing from scratch in a new entirely blue framework, if we did that we wouldn’t have to allocate so many resources to patch work.
Director: that sounds like it would cost money…
Blue: it would now but in the future it would save us so much more.
Director: couldn’t you just work harder for less pay?
Blue: no I literally couldn’t.
Director: Green seems to be holding it together well.
Blue: that is because Green is at the bottom of the stack, he doesn’t have to deal with it he makes it our problem.
Director: I don’t know, sounds like a skill issue to me, no vacation time until it’s fixed.
Blue: Like I even get a vacation anyway.
The system I’m working on is shit. The devs all know it, the users all complain about it. It needs to be fixed, and not only do I seem to be the person most driven to fix it, it turns out I’ve been hired explicitly to replace the shittiest part of it. So that’s actually pretty good, right?
Except my PO doesn’t quite want me to do that yet. First, he needs me to shovel more shit onto it. Shit that’s going to be the first stuff that I’ll replace once I get to replace stuff, and then that stuff will be a lot easier, whereas now it would be a lot harder and too slow to be useable. But new features are more important than making this useable.
He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t get technical priorities, and priorities are the primary responsibility for a PO.