Posts nobody asked for

Knife's edge

In this comment someone remarked:

all companies are operating on a knife's edge

And it makes sense, when you think about it. It's the corollary of:

if ain't broke don't fix it

Companies invest considerable time and money to get things off the ground and make them work. I say to barely make them work.

Because most projects are completed beyond schedule and over budget.

As soon as that minimum acceptance is achieved there's less than zero incentives to improve it. To polish it. Refactor it. To revisit tech debt left behind. And sometimes completely rethink and redo it.

After the struggles to make it airborne, developers are keen to move to shinnier things. Managers to end the apologising and proclaim "Mission Accomplished" (cue George W. Bush).

Touching code that barely works becomes a risky adventure, that only the approved enter, and only when there’s a clear JIRA ticket for it. Fresh meat assigned to extend or fix stuff are only allowed to touch the minimal amount of code, in the minimal amount of time. So, every 10 years, (cue Tony Montana) "say hello to my little friend", aka that big-bang rewrite.

Broken gets fixed but shoddy is forever

<!-- > > [https://twitter.com/bl0rq/status/1772076422435131489](https://twitter.com/bl0rq/status/1772076422435131489) -->

And that’s why, everywhere you go, every company is "operating on a knife’s edge".

• // we are such morons

• Swear words in the kernel

• Do you want more swear?? I know you do

• I Contribute to the Windows Kernel

• Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up

<!-- ## Solution? What products needs is constant attention. -->

 

Made with some <3 not a lot