Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Enough tap-dancing around the truth — beneath the slick surfaces, engineering at many companies is a mess. In the mad sprint to pump out features, excellence gets tossed aside. Technical debt piles up as fast as hockey stick growth charts. Infrastructure rots under pretty UI facades.
Let’s be very clear — this is a recipe for disaster. No amount of duct tape can hold together a cracked foundation forever. When engineering integrity crumbles, so too do companies, regardless of charismatic founders or vanity metrics. What will it take before we admit the emperor has no clothes?
Don’t pretend this isn’t happening. The sorry state of affairs is an open secret in our industry today. Still, too many are afraid to voice it aloud.
Why does this keep happening? Because everyone is obsessed with optics while ignoring the termites chewing through the walls. VCs want smoking gun metrics at any cost. Founders want overnight unicorns. Engineers are afraid to speak up for fear of being burdened with technical debt.
So issues get swept under the rug until one day it all implodes. Engineering org locked up by years of tech debt. Key engineers quitting left and right. Costs spiraling out of control. The house of cards comes crashing down.
This cycle keeps repeating itself while everyone sticks their head in the sand and pretends they can pave over problems by hiring more developers. But you can’t build skyscrapers on swampland foundations.
The truth is, every company has to navigate messy tradeoffs. But don’t use constraints as an excuse for throwing quality out the window. It IS possible to do things the right way, even with limited resources and time. What’s required is transparency, tenacity, and giving a damn.
Engineers have to raise their voices to call out problems early, not stay silent until it’s a dumpster fire. Leadership needs to allow time for refactoring, not just endless feature churn. Investors should praise startups who value quality code, not just hockey stick metrics.
We all have a role to play in stopping this race to the bottom. It starts with being honest about the shaky foundations and then doing the hard work to fix them. Are you ready to rebuild the right way? The time for action is now.
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