It's My Fault

There's a natural human tendency for people to want to assign blame when something goes awry. In particular, when assigned to messy code, programmers tend to blame management for not giving them the time to clean it up before being forced to work with it. At least, I am guilty of this.

But thinking about it seriously, I came to a (seemingly) obvious conclusion. I am wrong to assign blame to management. This not to say that their feature demands are reasonable given the current state of the code base. I am wrong because the quality of the code base is my responsibility. It does not matter that I was not the one to create the mess in the first place... it is my domain, and hence, my responsibility.

I should not 'ask for time' to clean up the code before proceeding on the new feature requests. The messy code is a direct hindrance to me completing my job and as such, it is my responsibility to remove that hindrance before proceeding. In essence, I don't ask for 'permission' or 'time' to clean up the code. I clean up the code before I start adding to it. Period.

That's not to say that refactoring code comes in the way of bug-fixing and feature additions. That's not to say I am some renegade who refuses to conform to the will of management. It's just the realization that management does not care about the quality of the code - they care about removal of bugs and enhancements to the system. How those things are accomplished is my job. Trying to convince them of the best way to do my job is foolish on my part, especially since they cannot appreciate the importance of code quality when it comes to modification. That's no weakness on their part... it's not their job to appreciate code quality. It's mine because I know the effect that the lack of said quality can have on the ability to do my job.

That's not to say that I plan to go guns-blazing and rewrite anything that looks sloppy. But, whenever tasked with a maintenance issue, my first step will quietly but assuredly be to clean up that area before I begin handling that issue.

It seems pretty obvious when stated like that, doesn't it? So where's the epiphany?

There's none, really - except for the sad realisation that I was taking on a battle with management over code quality that served no purpose except to handicap and frustrate me. At least I have learned my lesson, which will help me in the future.