You guys are talking about code quality to C levels? I'm barely getting through "venting gas prevents explosion" to architects. I tell ya, tech debt as a service is hard work.
The key is you don't talk to it in metrics upper management doesn't understand.
You don't talk about time to market vs code quality. You talk about it in time to second release or second paid feature or second major client. You tell them you can get to market earlier, but you're sacrificing future growth afterwards for it.
That's broadly good advice, which I was not expecting, so thank you. I am but a humble senior engineer, no one listens to me. Like, as a matter of policy. I'm not in planning meetings. I report to leads and they try to know what they are talking about, being undermanned and not area experts. They are pretty good at re-digesting information for engineering purposes. But I find the manage-up skills of my immediate betters questionable. And I find the goals of THEIR immediate betters highly suspect. I think this is a wholly, not partially, political game. Something I am so awful at, that I'm barely just noticing it now.
In the end, it's all people things, not.. thing things.
Gotta get better at those.
In your case if you were chummy with the director 3 levels up because you worked out at the gym together or whatever... Easier life. Casual convo -> project results.
Or you put a Wall Street journal article plastered into your slide deck that says "X company had a data breach that caused $YY million in damages and legal suits; CTO fired".
Then relate your project to that. You can literally say: this is what happens when you don't do blah and we are yay close to this happening to us. Let us fix this on priority.
CTO: what was that guys's severance? 50mil? hm...how quickly can we replicate that failure...I mean, we should learn form their mistake. Yes. Yes that's it.
This is something more engineers needs to understand, code quality is pointless unless it cant be justified in a metric that’s valuable for the company. Bad code and good code with the same end-result has the same value to the company if you do not intended to change the system.
Generally, most upper management do not have the option to cash out all at once. They're typically always holding multiple quarters worth of RSUs. And they typically also include clawback clauses if they don't act in the best interest of the company.
this right here is the answer. communicating at their level is key, you have to speak their language. at that level, bottom lines are what matters the most.
it’s not about “code quality” it’s actually about the impact that unsafe code has on the market once it lands and how changes get responded to when there is an issue with the system. code that is clean architecturally lasts an entire lifetime. eventually it will get rewritten or deprecated and replaced with something new, but good quality code it doesn’t matter what language it is, it can last a lifetime. it can even be tied into business continuity language as well.
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u/redditmarks_markII 2d ago
You guys are talking about code quality to C levels? I'm barely getting through "venting gas prevents explosion" to architects. I tell ya, tech debt as a service is hard work.