How can you tell if a company prioritizes maintainability over delivery?

Question

Specifically with respect to software development.The title should probably read "_faster_ delivery".I am currently in the gaping maw of chaos at my second development job of my career, and I see so many opportunities to clean things up and improve readability. Maybe I am just a naive Jr. Dev, but I prefer things to be as simple as possible &ndash; even if it means more lines of code, or comments explaining the business logic (ie what it _should_ do) instead of relying on external Jira tickets.How do you go about bringing this up in the interview process?

drallison · Accepted Answer

Sometimes you just have to look at the hardware product. A company which solders in batteries, for example, is probably not big on maintainability. Likewise, it it takes a special tool to gain access, it's likely not been designed by maintainability motivated engineers. For software it's a little harder. I think having fewer options, fewer knobs, and a simpler intuitive structure is an indicator of a bias towards maintainability. Also, not having source is a definite barrier to maintainability.BTW, I find it hard to believe that "_faster_delivery" and maintainability are in opposition. Most of us would agree that maintainable systems have fewer bugs at every stage. And experience has taught us that bugs, particularly subtle bugs, take a long time to find and correct.

verdverm · Answer

Listen to middle management / product managers and how they talk about goals, task priority, and solutions to customer problems

sarcasmatwork · Answer

aka "Technical debt"Get use to it, it exists in most companies. You could ask if technical debt (backlog) is actively being worked on is there a plan/vision to chip away at it etc.