> You rarely get credit for the disasters you prevented. Because nothing happened, people forget about it quickly.
There is another problem left implicit in the article: clueless people doing drive-by project reviews without any context or understanding of the whole problem domain, and proceeding to give unsolicited and unreflected advice supported by partial knowledge.
Also, sometimes projects with a perfect design end up failing for some reason or another, and projects doomed to fail end up pulling through and succeeding, even if they pile up technical debt. The truth of the matter is that software is soft and can adapt to changes in requirements and design, and with enough work anything can be made to work. Thus any observation on "failure" ends up being superficial opinions based on superficial observations.
I use the phrase "drive-by review" frequently too. As a senior engineer, I worry about doing drive-bys myself. Sometimes my gut tells me something is not quite right about the project, but I just don't know enough about the problem domain or technology/architecture choices to advise definitively.
In this case, I try to question the project owners on their assumptions and whether they have validated them. Usually this line of questioning reveals whether they have "done their homework".
> You rarely get credit for the disasters you prevented. Because nothing happened, people forget about it quickly.
There is another problem left implicit in the article: clueless people doing drive-by project reviews without any context or understanding of the whole problem domain, and proceeding to give unsolicited and unreflected advice supported by partial knowledge.
Also, sometimes projects with a perfect design end up failing for some reason or another, and projects doomed to fail end up pulling through and succeeding, even if they pile up technical debt. The truth of the matter is that software is soft and can adapt to changes in requirements and design, and with enough work anything can be made to work. Thus any observation on "failure" ends up being superficial opinions based on superficial observations.