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In consulting, that’s called “after work”. Got to pump those billables
Honestly though, unless it’s a feature that is completely outside the domain of the application. If you have to re-write your entire app then your app was probably dog shit to begin with
To be fair, it said "an enormous amount of code", not "your entire app", but yes, the ability to add unexpected new features or make focused changes without touching more than a minimal amount of existing code is a very good smell metric of code quality. The problem is that for every dev who understands how to program like that, there are at least five, probably more like ten who don't, which means most of us are working on teams that produce a blend of clean code and, as you say, dog shit, so the feature request that requires stirring up all that shit is out there waiting for us, like it or not. The best we can do, when it hits, is try to at least improve all the shit that we touch in the process. Maybe some of it can become compost, I dunno, the metaphor breaks there, gonna have to refactor the metaphor.
This literally happened in my meeting last week. Top position development manager was complaining the existing thing was shit. Basically means we have to build a new thing from scratch. And guess what? The deadline is 12 Sep.
If you think it was shit why did you let them do what they did in the past?
If you do this enough you know how to design your solutions to be relatively flexible. At least for your backends.
Your frontend will always churn, that's the nature of the job.
Your frontend will always churn, that’s the nature of the job.
Yep. The trick is to be gone before anyone finds the gross stuff needed to make it all work.
cries in open source frontend development
Sounds like job security to me.
It's a good thing I'm a hobbyist so that I can avoi- hmm, now that I think about it this feature could be really cool and shouldn't take too long to implement...
Jokes on them I charge by the hour
I was about to say. Rejoice! If this is a client these are billable hours
yea, but it stops being fun when they say it's a bug and it's always supposed to work like that.
Then it's a valuable lesson in writing your client contracts and your work change order templates.
If you bid per project you need to have clear milestones and sign-offs. If you bill per hour then it's not issue.