Quality, Cost and Speed, there is an impossible trinity in software engineering as it is in other industries, recently I have talked about this with my wife, she was mentioning it was nothing new because it existed in many different areas as well.
The reason I mentioned this was from a conversation I had with a previous boss. He was asking me to deliver two key features for our product in a short time, before a deadline (for some presentation), to be professional in managing the tasks and to be responsible to the delivery, I asked him which one has a higher priority, so I can start it first to be just in case if we cannot release two giant changes at the same time.
He had a disappointed face, and told me both are at the highest priority. Should we get more people to work on this and get more team members to join me then, he said no. I was very frustrated, and I basically cannot say anything more after this, and I really think there is an issue in this workplace.
He does not seem to trust me or other engineers in the workplace, we are basically become 2nd citizens of this company and took all the pressure for delivery.
He is not qualified to manage this project, I was still young that time, I didn’t think this further that time, obviously he does not understand this Impossible Trinity.
In this case, he wanted the speed and the cost, and obviously the quality cannot be guaranteed, and as you can predict, the end result is not good.
I had some other discussion with other engineers, both senior and junior, they experienced the similar at the work place, the boss kept pushing Crunch time with low cost, the quality of software became very bad, in another word, giant tech debt, made all of us very hard to work on it, so the company fell in a cycle.
Bad quality of codes => Hard to work on => Crunch to Speed => Event worse quality of codes.
I am happy now I am not there any more and I regret that I didn’t figured out this cycle first, but only focused on work itself.