The Real World sucks
Being of a reasonably calm disposition, I rarely reach boiling point, but there are a couple of things that really do grind my gears. Inefficiency is one of them, but let's not go there right now. What's really grinding my gears right now, is how much the so-called Real World (as opposed to the academic world) sucks.
Every once in a while, I will stumble upon a piece of code that I really wish wasn't there. It's the kind of code that screams "please refactor me!". It's the exploding septic tank of code smells. When I look at it, the words "well that's going to come back to bite us in the arse" pop into my head. In an ideal world, I'd be able to just sit down for a day and refactor the damned thing. This Real World thing, unfortunately, has something that's called management. Or was it manglement? They're part of Layer 8 either way. That's right, the political layer.
These politics seem to revolve solely around short term benefits. And so refactoring a piece of code that could cause problems eventually in such-and-such a situation isn't deemed important. This is fair enough in some cases, but sometimes you really do know that this decision will come back to haunt you. Sometimes I wonder whether managers really don't care about long-term implications, or whether they like having a couple of big bugs lurking in the code in the hope that some of these will be discovered much later so that we can get paid to fix them. Must be my cynical mind talking.
Is there a good way of dealing with this sort of nonsense? It's always possible to pull overtime and refactor the code then, but what if you introduce a bug? Good luck explaining a bug in new-and-improved code that you weren't supposed to write in the first place.
Yup, the Real World sucks. But if anyone has a way of making it better, I'd be glad to hear it!
