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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • JordanZ@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Anyone have solid, tried and true strategies for improving communications with engineers?
    131·
    4 months ago

    As a software developer that’s worked on a ton of legacy, home-grown, years old software systems, they may not be dodging the nitty gritty…they frankly don’t know it.

    Some of the systems I’ve had to work on were over a decade old and being maintained or patched by anybody that had a free minute(as in over 150 individual contributors over its life, 75% of which are no longer employed). So while I know what the main goal of the system is there are a bunch of little side responsibilities that nobody knows about. Like we need this thing but nobody will stick it on a roadmap or prioritize it so I’ll just stick it in here as a bug fix. Now multiply that over however long that spaghetti bowl of code has been around for. So that means that code isn’t documented, and likely doesn’t have a ticket in Jira(because you mentioned it) explaining why it exists at all. So that leaves a lot of questions. Chances are your devs have come across some code like this and know they don’t know what it does and expect to find more if they look. Tracking down why all that junk exists and if its still required can take a staggering amount of time. Trying to juggle that with your day to day is…not practical. So unless some time gets blocked out to actually answer those questions I find it unlikely that you’ll get what you need.