What do you do when your boss doesn't care about code quality?
- by Chad Johnson
My boss (a proprietor) is a developer like me. He comes, however, from a C background and severely lacks knowledge of the benefits of proper object-oriented design. That, or he simply ignores them.
So my co-worker developed this feature prototype in a week, and it's not release-ready--at least not from a good code standpoint. It works; it does the job--but it'sa freaking prototype. It's totally not scalable.
My boss wants to wow clients and "just get the feature out." I understand that. But, we could take two weeks and finish this shit up, or we could take three and finish this shit up AND do it so that it's scalable.
I just KNOW we are going to want to add onto this feature in the coming months, and then, a customer is going to "need it in a week," and so even though we've agreed to refactor when we want to add onto the feature, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!
This ALWAYS happens. I'm the code quality assurance guy, but my boss seems to see me as a radical and thinks I just waste time, whereas I actually am trying to follow good, known solid design patterns. He just wants his stinking feature though, and he doesn't want to spend the time or money to do things well. He pretty much listens to what I have to say, and then he ultimately just makes the decision to take the shortest path (which cuts corners a lot).
I often develop large, important features for our software. THOSE THINGS TAKE TIME! They're not happy with the time it's taken with past projects, though, but the features I've put in all work really damn well and are very scalable.
How do you all deal with this kind of situation?
