A Case Study in Technical Debt - Senior Software Engineer Open Dealer Exchange Employee Review

ODEs current technology situation is a textbook example of technical debt and the broad challenges it presents and should be presented in universities as an example of what happens when you neglect good engineering practices in favor of quick code modifications. The current culture is one of acceptance and the message is to do what's necessary to fix things. But ongoing business decisions chill honest attempts at improvement. A skilled developer with a positive attitude will be encouraged to refactor and improve, but you will self-censor due to pragmatic concerns. Additionally, new developers are not granted admin access to their workstations, regardless of title. As a Senior I had to ping service desk to install Visual Studio updates. Installation of a Visual Studio plugin required approval from managers, directors, vice presidents, and the CTO. Once approval was granted the plugin still wasn't installed until an 8-question justification challenge was answered. This challenge came post-approval. I was asked to write a PowerShell script but was denied access to execute it during development. I tied up a senior infrastructure engineer while we did a screen share where I would edit code and say, "try now". Preexisting developers have admin access grandfathered in so there is little guidance from colleagues on how to navigate the process. A frequently heard response is "works on my machine" or "you don't have access to that?" First line management is sympathetic and makes genuine attempts to remove barriers, but if you are used to working fast and trying new and creative solutions you will find yourself swimming upstream until you are exhausted and just go with the flow.