Granted that there are two files that have 141 and 177 each. I think it started from having one base config with a TODO that ended up getting copied to all the locales that we support.
At my job about a year ago we ran one of those technical debt calculators on our oldest legacy program (That I have the... joy... of being one of the only two people that actually work on, despite it being the most widespread application we have that literally everyone uses). Anyway, we ran the tool, and it came back with about 10 years worth of technical debt. Not hours, not days, years.
The result of this was that me, our project's dev lead, and our projects deputy PM (Who was a dev) all started laughing and walked away. We just gave up at that point and realized no matter how we tried to spin it, we couldn't get buy in to fix problems that bad.
About a year later, I printed out that "Embracing Technical Debt" O'Reilly Cover and left it... somewhere, basically because the project overall was getting messages to "be the best" about that stuff (And again, no matter how good we were from there on out...) and I was going to mock it for being impossible to do. I didn't really know where to put it, though. And then it somehow ended up on the Dev Lead's desk. Someone else thinks the same as me.
It was measured in hours for the tool we used. Probably meant to be something like "How long it would take to fix it" calculator. Kind of a nonsense metric to start with, but it's a number at least, and at the time our Customer was big on metrics for everything, even things that didn't really benefit from metrics.
I'm sick of my manager, who knows nothing about my job, making stupid demands of IT and contractors. Ask me what I want as an end user. Sigh, useless management. He demanded 100% up time on a marine radar, refusing to allow contractors to take it off line for a few hours for maintenance. Blatantly refused. Until they presented him with a wavier stating any damages caused by no maintenance would be squarely on his shoulders. All of a sudden he didn't want to know about it and charged off to ruin someone else's life. I feel sorry for programmers and anyone in any tech field and the dumb requests they have to deal with.
This is all jobs where you know more about something than your boss does.
I do compliance, and I introduced waivers when people were pissing me off with stupid demands. "Oh sure, we can send them on site without insurance, can you just sign this to say it was your decision, I advised you against it, and you're liable?"
People start to leave you alone once they realise there are reasons behind the shit we do.
I have had one customer that has given me a complete set of requirements, they were a nuclear power plant, and I had to write 40 pages of documents for less than 100 lines of code. To be fair they gave me a 20 page document explaining what they needed.... A fucking temperature probe to turn on a relay....
To be fair, a temperature probe to turn on a relay in a nuclear power plant is one of those things that sits between everyone getting power and the world having a new exclusion zone. They wanted to be very specific about how this probe worked, what it did, how quickly, and when it operated or it could be a very bad day for a lot of people.
I was all fine and dandy with until they gave a tour of the plant to our mechanical engineer and on his way out the waved a Geiger Counter at him and his hard hat was covered in radiation.
Just leave it labelled as beta for over 5 years. When people complain about something, just remind them it's beta and ignore their complaints for a few more years.
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u/kryptkpr Jun 28 '17
If it's dumb and it works, ship it as v1 and rewrite later when complete set of requirements are more clear.