Engineering-Management

Every codebase has skeletons in the closet. You know exactly where they are. That module nobody wants to touch. The database migration that “worked” but left three orphaned tables. The authentication flow that was built as a temporary solution eighteen months ago and is now load-bearing infrastructure. You know where all the bodies are buried because you helped bury some of them.

The engineers know too. They bring it up in retros. They mention it in 1:1s. They write tickets that sit in the backlog with labels like “tech-debt” and “cleanup” and “please-for-the-love-of-god.” And nothing happens, because there’s always another feature, another deadline, another client request that takes priority.

I watched a CTO tell his fully remote team that he had an “open door policy.” He said it in a Slack channel. I sat there for a moment, staring at my screen, trying to work out where the door was.

He meant well. Of course he did. He was trying to say “I’m approachable, come to me with problems.” But what he actually created was a channel where three junior developers pinged him every time they hit a snag, two senior engineers never said a word until things were properly on fire, and he spent his entire day context-switching between half-conversations that could have been, and I’m sorry but it’s true, a Google search.