I’m a mid level engineer and my team is overwhelmed. There’s more work than we can complete in the timelines that leadership/product has committed to, which is causing leadership to override technical decisions seemingly to meet those deadlines. An example would be routing all live traffic to a feature which was not fully tested, instead of waiting until testing is complete or having that change be dormant and the feature enabled later. Has anyone dealt with this type of issue?

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You work at a startup? If so, this is standard procedure 😅

funny

Large company, smaller teams

The harsh truth is that you write code to appease someone who pays you. If their idea of a release doesn’t include time for testing, then testing is not a priority for them.

You can try to speak on it to your superiors by showing how lack of testing is affecting the product. You can pad dev time with extra cushion for testing. You can also leave for greener pastures. However, one thing you can’t do is frame it in a way that’s about writing “perfect” code.

I see it all the time. It never works. An eager dev says that the team should be writing the product in a certain way, because a specific pattern or architecture fits the project. Or perhaps the dev feels that a module needs a rewrite to accommodate changes that weren’t introduced well. The response is always, “How is the change a positive for the customer?”

Make your suggestions about product stability. Don’t be afraid to look for a job elsewhere.

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You are not powerless here.

If it needs testing just do it.
If you need to pad estimates for that just do it.
If you want to feign incompetence in planning so you can get the cycles to fix, that is always an option, you are just choosing not to.
I'm not saying you should disobey orders and get court marshalled though, so use common sense.

Discuss the trade offs. If you are a broken record and keep talking about testing that's just not as effective as someone that leads by example and does the actual testing. People don't want nags they want problem solvers.

Sometimes first on the market beats perfect. It's not glamorous. Second place at a race with proper form isn't gold, and some folks want the one that finished first that ran screaming with arms flailing.

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I’ve been vocal about how this affects our team as well as our clients, but it seems they are more concerned with essentially making incremental changes on a weekly basis rather than taking some extra days just to get something right. From a technical perspective this drives me insane as this is not the optimal way to solve issues and make improvements in my opinion.

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Sounds like you don’t have great deployment processes. Cutting out features and improving later is ok, but not properly testing things can piss users off

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Yes, have been at this situation far more than I like. But this is reality sometimes. A startup I am a fractional cto now is going through the same situation and it is getting worst. The business thinks they are delivering value so often but what they are delivering is broken pieces of value and this has a major impact on their customer outlook. So I am helping them get on track by putting certain processes in place to help the business prioritize using a quandrant approach where the axises are business impact vs development complexity.

So far things seem to be improving.

Any advice on how to cope while you’re in it? This drives me up a wall because we wind up having to fix the very same issues that were introduced due to this broken process

Good enough development is tough to cope with as an engineer. But as the engineer you have power to say what constitutes a working product. One of my tactics is to piggyback tech debt refactors with P1 bug fixes (it has to make sense though). If leadership wants you to ship broken products in the name of speed then abandon ship because broken is never good enough.

Yes and no. I've worked at a place where the vp of product said "just don't test". And effectively tied a teams performance to not testing.

The result was that when this project picked up and became important, two more teams came into it, and it was a ... Really good time for everyone.

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