You gave the caveats, but I’m still curious to hear what companies you felt had this engineer vs manager conflict routinely about code quality. Mostly, I’d like to know so I can avoid working at those companies.
I suspect the conflict might be exacerbated at places where managers don’t write code (especially if they’ve never written code). My managers at Google and Waymo have tended to be very supportive of code health projects. The discussion of how to trade-off code debt and velocity is also very explicit. We’ve gotten pretty guidance in some quarters along the lines of ‘We are sprinting and expect to accumulate debt’ vs ‘We are slowing down to pay off tech debt’. This makes it pretty easy to tell if a given code health project is something that company leadership wants me to be doing right now.
You gave the caveats, but I’m still curious to hear what companies you felt had this engineer vs manager conflict routinely about code quality. Mostly, I’d like to know so I can avoid working at those companies.
I suspect the conflict might be exacerbated at places where managers don’t write code (especially if they’ve never written code). My managers at Google and Waymo have tended to be very supportive of code health projects. The discussion of how to trade-off code debt and velocity is also very explicit. We’ve gotten pretty guidance in some quarters along the lines of ‘We are sprinting and expect to accumulate debt’ vs ‘We are slowing down to pay off tech debt’. This makes it pretty easy to tell if a given code health project is something that company leadership wants me to be doing right now.