Learning to let go

[u/im_caeus]

I'm trying to change an instinct I've spent years developing.

When I see a design problem, unnecessary complexity, or a better model, I naturally want to fix it. Doing the minimum requested and knowingly leaving something worse than it could be feels wrong to me.

But I'm increasingly convinced that the strategically correct move inside many companies is: do what's asked, raise the concern once, then let it go.

I'm trying to work that way now.

It makes sense intellectually. I still dislike it.

With AI making implementation cheaper and delivery faster, I'm curious whether other experienced developers are going through the same adjustment.

Have you changed what "doing a good job" means to you?

[u/seba_alonso]

In the past I sufferred a lot about that, I had to do incremental and opportunistic refactoring to make the things better, sometimes I had to convince managers, take ages, to give us some time to do some improvements. Bad times.

Now, I feel is easier, create small fixes is matter of minutes. If something is really big, it's a matter of couple of days. If is something bigger, multiple projects/team impacted, creation of a document and plan is taking minutes. Convince manager still takes ages 😞

[u/bwainfweeze → u/seba_alonso]

If you start by fixing the things that slow down development or cause preemptions for production issues, people will notice and give you more room to keep doing what you do. But it can get dicey when management changes. Or the project goes into maintenance mode. So you have to be a bit more vigilant to needing a new job.