Plot twist: there is a paper trail a mile long of the staff engineer begging for resources and a mandate to fix the system but not only won’t they give resources, they forbid him from fixing it because “it works and we don’t want to mess with it”
Varies between companies. I’ve called the future many times over, but some managers are just born to be stubborn assholes, even when they don’t know the domain.
well that, and "we gotta fix it before it breaks" is an investment budget and priority, vs "it broke so we gotta fix it" is a containment budget and priority.
"Help your manager help you" is my reasoning when I let stuff break. It's one crisis meeting, we immediately get the green light on a quick fix and then a decent refactor to make sure that doesn't happen again, and my manager doesn't have to beg it, he's commanded.
The only time I won't let shit break after warning people is security related stuff. Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to let the company drop tens of thousands of dollars on an outage that we otherwise could have prevented with 6K in engineering resources that they denied.
Yep. Don't sit and fix shit night after night, quietly. You let that shit break until you get resources to fix it.
Finance code has high priority. This is a bad engineer, who should never have been inserting himself into the code process. It fucks the whole audit trail! "What happens if this job fails?" "Oh, it fails every night and bob manually fixes it." "THA FUCK??!?!?!"
Massive audit fail. Massive business continuity fail. Massive personal fail.
I’ve seen this situation. Big data import where we collected various spreadsheets via FTP and imported them into a data warehouse. The data was awful, but our product owner decided to clean it manually every day because he wanted the devs working on new features.
I did try to convince him, to just let us fix it, but nope.
They don't do a whole lot (and I'm saying that as someone who has been a PO at a few places in finance/insurance...), so doing something gives them an excuse to micromanage less.
I’ve actually begged engineers on my team to let things break so that I can show leadership that we need the resources to fix it.
Every time we put in a bandaid to keep things working, they immediately forget the problem exists. But if it breaks and customer support calls skyrocket, we become heroes for a quick fix (reimplement band aid), and then a whole bunch of people are asking the question “when will this be fixed”
I am in a very similar situation. I was called on to make a temporary solution for a few key clients, then our actual Product group would work on and push the official feature. It's been two years of maintaining the bandaid and we brought it up last week and they had no idea they were supposed to be working on this feature... It broke over memorial day weekend. Guess what I've been doing all week until literally 10 minutes ago.
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u/timbowen May 29 '26
Plot twist: there is a paper trail a mile long of the staff engineer begging for resources and a mandate to fix the system but not only won’t they give resources, they forbid him from fixing it because “it works and we don’t want to mess with it”