this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Software has a serious "one more lane will fix traffic" problem.
Don't give programmers better hardware or else they will write worse software. End of.
This is very true. You don't need a bigger database server, you need an index on that table you query all the time that's doing full table scans.
You never worked on old code. It's never that simple in practice when you have to make changes to existing code without breaking or rewriting everything.
Sometimes the client wants a new feature that cannot easily implement and has to do a lot of different DB lookups that you can not do in a single query. Sometimes your controller loops over 10000 DB records, and you call a function 3 levels down that suddenly must spawn a new DB query each time it's called, but you cannot change the parent DB query.
Where is this even coming from? The guy above me is saying not to give devs better hardware and to teach them to code better.
I followed up with an example of how using indices in a database to boost the performance helped more than throwing more hardware at it.
This has nothing to do with having worked on old code. Stop trying to pull my comment out of context.
But yes you're right. Adding indexes to a database does nothing to solve adding a new feature in the scenario you described. I also never claimed it did.
Why not?
This sounds like the "don't touch working code" nonsense I hear from junior devs and contracted teams. They're so worried about creating bugs that they don't fix larger issues and more and more code gets enshrined as "untouchable." IMO, the older and less understood logic is, the more it needs to be touched so we can expose the bugs.
Here's what should happen, depending on when you find it:
Teams should have a budget for tech debt, and seniors can adjust what tech debt they pick.
In general though, if you're afraid to touch something, you should touch it, but only if you budget time for it.
"Don't touch working code" stems from "last person who touched it, owns it" and there's some shit that it's just not worth your pay grade to own.
Particularly if you're a contractor employed to work on something specific
I get that for contractors, get in and get out is the best strategy.
If you're salary, you own it regardless, so you might as well know what it does.
That budget is the key. You have to demonstrate/convince the purse holders first. This isn't always an easy task.
Fair. If that's not possible, I'll start looking for another job, because I don't want to deal with a time bomb that will suddenly explode and force me to come in on a holiday of something to fix it. My current company allocates 10-20% of dev time to tech debt, because we all know it'll happen, so we budget for it.
That's why it needs to be written better in the first place
Tell me you never worked on legacy code without telling me...
Kid. Go away
You do accept that bad software has been written, yes? and that some of that software is performing important functions? So how is saying "It needs to be written better in the first place" of any use at all when discussing legacy software?
It's not, but you'll still hear it a lot. Funny, no one can agree on what "better" means, especially not the first person who wrote it, who had unclear requirements, too little time, and 3 other big tickets looming. All of these problems descend from management, they don't always spontaneously come into being because of "bad devs", although sometimes they do.
Or sharding on a particular column