this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
169 points (99.4% liked)

Programming

26304 readers
798 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
UlrikHD@programming.dev
bugsmith@programming.dev
Spyro@programming.dev
169
Your Engineers Aren't Lazy, Your Codebase Is Punishing Them (piechowski.io)
submitted 1 day ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Show me a place where this isn’t the case. Because I’ve never seen it not be the case in 20+ years in the field.

[–] the_radness@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago

15+ years in engineering here. 10+ in leadership.

Code formatting hasn't been an issue since the early '10s. Tabs or spaces? Who cares. Your editor can make it look like whatever you want and it won't effect the code.

As for other asshole-ish behavior or gatekeeping, I open it up to a vote. Let the team determine best practices. Don't like what your team decides? Find another team to shitlord over.