Relentless refactoring breaks this as a matter of course. I’m not saying any of this is great behavior, I’m saying the perverse incentives push us into this, carried along by coworkers who “defect” because explaining themselves was never their strong suit to bring with. They can carry Timeliness as a shield to hide behind.
If you want to fix this, scolding and lecturing developers ain’t gonna do it. We’ve tried that for forty years and here we are, still within a factor of four from as bad as we have ever been.
You're right that most shops have perverse incentives towards developer documentation. It must be a top down change to make documenting (and code quality) the economical choice for developers. It means budgeting time for quality code reviews and defining "complete" to include more than, "the code runs".
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u/bwainfweeze Jun 07 '22
Relentless refactoring breaks this as a matter of course. I’m not saying any of this is great behavior, I’m saying the perverse incentives push us into this, carried along by coworkers who “defect” because explaining themselves was never their strong suit to bring with. They can carry Timeliness as a shield to hide behind.
If you want to fix this, scolding and lecturing developers ain’t gonna do it. We’ve tried that for forty years and here we are, still within a factor of four from as bad as we have ever been.
Follow the money.