Shitty developers are going to make shitty software.
Every City Mayor wants to build their bridge in 1 week. However, you don't see Civil Engineers "cutting corners" and leaving "debt" when designing and building those bridges. There's a minimum quality that they will sign off. No matter how loud their bosses shout.
When I lead Software Dev teams, I always told developers not to compromise certain quality factors. If someone asked them "can it be done faster" and they answered "yes, but X thing would suffer" they are giving a door to for sloppiness, and the Business side doesn't have a way to understand the implications of X. They only hear "yes". On the flip side, if an developer says "it will take 2 weeks", there's nothing else non-technical people can do but sit down and wait.
The only ones that can really challenge that are other technical people, and hopefully if Business "escalates" the developer to his manager's manager (up to the CTO), she will be backed up by the technical higher ups, if she makes sense. I would sit down with people trying to shorten development time of some things. There are times where it is sensible to get some debt, but it is a decision that shouldn't be done by Jr or even Mid level engineers.
Agree with everything else you said but take some issue with this:
> Shitty developers are going to make shitty software.
That’s really not the point I was trying to make. It’s more of a trap to blame ICs on the ground in most situations when they’re usually only following existing practices. All this will do is demoralize your engineers.
Mismanagement in the form of poor staffing choices (especially moving tenured and experienced engineers to the next shiny thing) is often the culprit. This usually stemming from the pressure from leadership to ship stuff fast, as usual.
Once you sacrifice quality of any kind, that bar gets lowered for good, and before you know it there are so many examples of poor quality that any issues get lost in the noise.
Shitty developers are going to make shitty software.
Every City Mayor wants to build their bridge in 1 week. However, you don't see Civil Engineers "cutting corners" and leaving "debt" when designing and building those bridges. There's a minimum quality that they will sign off. No matter how loud their bosses shout.
When I lead Software Dev teams, I always told developers not to compromise certain quality factors. If someone asked them "can it be done faster" and they answered "yes, but X thing would suffer" they are giving a door to for sloppiness, and the Business side doesn't have a way to understand the implications of X. They only hear "yes". On the flip side, if an developer says "it will take 2 weeks", there's nothing else non-technical people can do but sit down and wait.
The only ones that can really challenge that are other technical people, and hopefully if Business "escalates" the developer to his manager's manager (up to the CTO), she will be backed up by the technical higher ups, if she makes sense. I would sit down with people trying to shorten development time of some things. There are times where it is sensible to get some debt, but it is a decision that shouldn't be done by Jr or even Mid level engineers.