“we need more resources” is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn’t always matter).

The right answer is usually : “No”. Or at least “Prioritize”. Or “This is what we need to get it done” at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don’t want software that doesn’t work decently in the first place.

Never touched it? A website? What about updating frameworks for security issues?

The closest I got to this kind of job., is the closest I got to running away. I’m much happier elsewhere now.

This, to a point.

Other things help :

• Unit test to help catch regressions. If you are confident in your test catching a good portion of bugs from refactoring, at least you feel confident refactoring. Worst case, at least you ensured your code is testable. There is nothing worse than refactoring untestable code.
• Self-documenting code and when it fails to self-document, comments or refer to a wiki page.

I think this depends on the crowd. Unfortunately, the intelligent crowd and the crowd with money and power is not exactly the same. Though hopefully there is overlap.

I think this points to a large problem in our society is how we train and pick our managers. Oh wait we don’t. They pick us.

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Those are really stupid managers.

If you don’t have docs it’s a tough competition between having your more knowledgeable devs re-explaining what they know X times to X new hires, or letting new devs figure it out on their own which is both costly in terms of their time and more importantly, risky as hell.

Bad managers love risk though. Since it usually is a choice between speed now and risk later, it only blows up in your face later, and quite spectacularly, and everyone looks like heroes while they are putting fires out on overtime.

That said good managers probably don’t tolerate that shit from bad managers under them and can sniff out a firefighter culture pretty quick.

I guess what I meant to say was, managers that value doc do exist. If they really do, they’ll let you know.

That is different than for layoffs, which generally is less about rooting out toxic people and more about lowering costs. And people know it usually.

That said, anyone causing trouble for management or viewed as not pulling their weight will be the first on the list since management won’t have to justify firing them.

Expect this from corporate and political types alike.

Takes time to become ubiquitous.

Learning to deal with “unmaintanable” codebases is a pretty good skill. It taught me good documentation and refactoring manners. It’s only a problem for you if management does not accept that their velocity has gone down as a result of tech debt pilling up.

Code should scream it’s intent (business-wise) so as to be self-documenting as much as possible As much as possible is not 100%, so add comments when needed. Comments should be assumed to be relevant when written, at best. Git comment should be linked to your work ticket so that we can figure out why the hell you would do that, when looking at the code file itself. I swear some people seem to think we only read them in PRs (we don’t). Overall concepts used everyday, if they need to be reexplained, should probably be written down (at least today’s version). Tests are documentation. Often the only up to date one?

Git wasn’t used all that much in the 2000s. As far as I know it became popular in the 2010s (though it was always a thing in some circles I think) and then just supplanted almost everything else.

Also keep in mind some shops tend to follow larger tech companies (microsoft, etc.) and their product offering. So even new products might not have been on git until MS went in that direction.

That said, working from home has so far saved me a lot of both time and money. This is a thing to consider as an employee when considering who to work for (or if your boss takes it away, if you still want to work there after essentially having a benefit revoked unilateraly).

Public transit pass. Actual time for transit which for me was around 90 minutes a day (7.5 hours a week!), more complex lunch logistics (time or money), etc.

A quieter workplace, no need to book rarely available rooms to take calls/meetings. There were upsides.

My first remote job had almost no issues at all. We already knew each other and we still took time to discuss issues via calls. New job not so much. We tend to be pressed for time so only focus on obvious “work” and then works suffers because of a lack of communication/common vision.