2023-09-14

Thursday, September 14

Super generic day at work. The new guy at Fusion, Ben, wants to know how to fix the bullshit in the codebase. This was my answer to him:

I originally said to my boss that I’ve literally had to purchase a second laptop to work on this codebase and its not feasible for me or other devs to work on this codebase in this state. My boss is, like James, technically good enough to be a pain but not good enough to be useful - he basically kept insisting “there must be another way”.

His eventual response was to time box it and he’ll talk to James (my other boss I guess) with a deal that went something like this:

• Jamie will invest time to uplift it
• This time will be outside of my contracted hours
• If he gets it working you pay
• If he doesn’t then you dont pay anything

So I put a fair few hours on it and I think I had a large part of it complete, but I haven’t touched it in a long time so my memory escapes me. This was early on in m fusion career and I am much, much, much more across the codebase now so I feel that I can rip this apart very quickly these days.

I think in terms of what it will take to make this happen comes down to whatever pricing James/My Boss can agree on. Just to be clear - I’m a bitch that gets pimped out, I have little say in these things. My take on it can be summed up like this:

This is critical product maintenance. It is affecting everyone, everywhere, all the time. I think from James’ perspective he doesn’t see a problem because things are still coming out and being released, however we both know that the delivery speed alone is probably taxed at 60% just because of the environment

From my bosses perspective he’ll say something like “if James wants it done then he’ll pay for it” and they’ll negotiate a price.

Its a fucked situation because I don’t have a clear way to navigate it, and believe it or not I feel a lot of responsibility to Fusion to make sure it doesn’t topple over. From a sheer product and developer perspective its absolutely abysmal, let alone infinitely insecure, but from (I guess) a business perspective I haven’t found a way to make a strong enough case for it.

So given that, the only way I can think of is this:

• you convince James it needs to be done
• I talk to my boss and say “bruh, we need to do this, but you have to have a very accommodating price for it”

Adam, the CTO was also a fucking dick today. I’ve supported him endlessly, but after yesterday he can go and fucking choke. He’s the boss, he can live and die on his own fucking decisions.