The first thing that I think that happens to most of us software developers that causes us to lose hope is we are forced to cut corners.
We are basically told you have to hit a certain deadline.
And we start doing some work and when we get close to that deadline, we inevitably realize that it is going to take us longer than we thought.
And if you are anybody that has been programming, or doing software development.
Whether you are in Ops, or UX or any discipline related to software development, you know that estimates in software development are highly improbable to hit.
Also read: 1 Law of Success as a Developer
And I don't care how much you have an Agile coach come in, or you know, the biggest experts tell you that this isn't true.
My experience and most people I have worked with that have been doing this for at least a little while now.
It is really not that people are not good at estimating.
It is just that the reliability of estimates is bad.
And, if you work at a company that doesn't understand that, and you get to a situation where you realize the work is going to take longer, most companies, unfortunately, that don't have a healthy tech culture.
They are going to pressure you to hit that deadline.
And then usually what we have to do, I have had to do this, we have to compromise what we know is right for the code.
- We have to write low quality code.
- We have to hack things to shortcut maybe our unit tests.
- We now have to not follow a set of design patterns that we know will work, just to rush to it to hit that deadline.
And I think that when you have done that enough times, it is so frustrating you can completely lose hope in your job.
Happy Coding!
Karl
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Top comments (3)
You're right, sometimes we do have to make trade-offs between code quality and delivery efficiency, but more often than not, good coding also allows us to deliver faster
Don't estimate. Ignore deadlines. Seriously. You'll be happier, and produce better work.
Louder for the people at the back.