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Ask HN: How can you tell if a company prioritizes maintainability over delivery?
1 point by 100721 on May 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Specifically with respect to software development.

The title should probably read "_faster_ delivery".

I am currently in the gaping maw of chaos at my second development job of my career, and I see so many opportunities to clean things up and improve readability. Maybe I am just a naive Jr. Dev, but I prefer things to be as simple as possible – even if it means more lines of code, or comments explaining the business logic (ie what it _should_ do) instead of relying on external Jira tickets.

How do you go about bringing this up in the interview process?



Sometimes you just have to look at the hardware product. A company which solders in batteries, for example, is probably not big on maintainability. Likewise, it it takes a special tool to gain access, it's likely not been designed by maintainability motivated engineers. For software it's a little harder. I think having fewer options, fewer knobs, and a simpler intuitive structure is an indicator of a bias towards maintainability. Also, not having source is a definite barrier to maintainability.

BTW, I find it hard to believe that "_faster_delivery" and maintainability are in opposition. Most of us would agree that maintainable systems have fewer bugs at every stage. And experience has taught us that bugs, particularly subtle bugs, take a long time to find and correct.


Listen to middle management / product managers and how they talk about goals, task priority, and solutions to customer problems


aka "Technical debt"

Get use to it, it exists in most companies. You could ask if technical debt (backlog) is actively being worked on is there a plan/vision to chip away at it etc.




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