You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. — Epictetus
We usually dodge problems. It’s an evolution-programmed attitude, it keeps us away from pain. You have a problem with someone and prefer to let it go. You have a malfunctioning dishwasher but you don’t call a technician to fix it because it still cleans your dishes. You have a technical debt but always put off paying it.
Recently I decided to take control back of my finances. I have never been in need, but from time to now, we started to feel some financial pressure. After a checkpoint, we realised that we are overindebted. Not much, but if experts recommend not getting into debt for more than 30% of your monthly salary we are in 32% right now.
How do we get there? Coincidence. Every time we were going to start to feel this pressure, an extra amount of money came in the form of a performance bonus or compensation for a past car crash. Those paychecks created a false feeling of comfort and we neglect the accounts.
That was childish behaviour. You have to take care of your stuff: your economy, your children, your partner, your work, your personal growth, etc. Simply because no one is going to take care of it. It is your responsibility.
In the context of our industry, don’t wait for a colleague to finish your task. For example, I heard so many times the sentence “QA team will test this” as an excuse for weak testing suites… Or reviewed so many PRs with workarounds in the code which didn’t fix the cause, but the consequence of a bug because “I have to finish my work”… That’s not good for the team.
QA must be the last containment dam in the case of wrong implementations of a feature but good code coverage provided by unit, integration and system tests must accompany your code. And the work of an individual in a team is the work of that team. If some bug is not fixed properly and tickets never stop coming, the failure is of the team as a whole.
Taking care of your stuff is what will distinguish your code quality from others in the industry. This mindset will improve your code’s quality and reliability. It will make you a better developer because you will learn how to make decoupled and testable code, code adapted to infrastructure changes.
Be an adult and take care of your stuff.