How an interview code submission that wasn’t even submitted changed our process
I recall being in assembly class in school and a classmate said "I can't wait to be done with this so I don't have to do it again" . I was taken aback—I enjoyed assembly class (and still occasionally write assembly for my rpi). I didn't understand why he was there if he wasn't interested in the subject matter. Was it just for the future paycheck? That's valid...I guess.
But as it turns out, it's been my experience that he is representative of a large portion of the programmer population: people that don't enjoy programming. They don't care; they just want to get to the next ticket, keep their sprint velocity up, collect their paycheck, and then go do what they really want to do (which is not programming).
Everything is a computer now, which means that software engineers are really everything engineers. Most of you reading this are not software engineers and so don't see the sausage being made, but it's been my experience that most software engineers are not engineers. The employees that are writing the code that controls more and more of the physical world around us don't have that deep spark of interest that drives them to get it right, just right enough to close the sprint as fast as humanly possible.
When you sacrifice good code for good enough code, you leave holes in what you've built. And they know this; they've come up with a cute name for it: technical debt. The implication is that technical debt is OK; it's just the cost of their sins which will one day be paid for. But like many other kinds of debt that day never seems to be today. They're accumulating tech debt. They're weakening the foundation to build just a little bit faster. We're living at the top of a very tall Jenga tower and as long as the software engineers can keep their sprint velocity up, can keep building the top of the tower higher, they will feel justified in continuing their practices.
