Most places I've worked, devs were basically afraid to prototype

Either you would get chastised for wasting time with prototypes, or worse, your prototype would end up in production

I think the software industry really needs a cultural reset to embrace slower and deliberate development to build quality, but unfortunately AI has us racing recklessly in the wrong direction

I am so tired of it. Are there any companies out there that actually give devs time to build quality software anymore? I'm so burned out of the "move fast and break everything" grind

I understand both sides.

Quality must come from engineering. If you’re depending on a product manager to ask you that you can improve the quality of the code, you already lost.

So it requires soft skills, proper framing and ability to iterate quickly on quality-related tasks without leaving junk and multiple-versions behind.

But I completely understand push back for “doing improvements developers want to do”: A lot of developers confuse quality with familiarity or even complexity/verbosity. So business people have a reason to be reluctant.

And as an engineering manager I also had to push back several times. The thing that makes money is not the place to learn new skills, for example.

I think there's an argument that it could be cheaper and better for morale to let employees upskill while working on the thing that makes money.

It really depends on how mature the developer is.

If they have the soft-skills to do it, then by all means.

If not, they need to upskill their soft skills before tackling anything big.

Ask on sprint planning if time can be set aside to spike out a proof of concept, and then you go do that prototyping in the sprint.

Has this (for me, normal) process really been that arduous in your past jobs? It's a slam dunk to leadership, as we do this to corral time wasted.

All these companies want devs with top-engineering talent and coding skill, but then fire them because they aren't using LLMs enough.

Might be the opposite in some orgs. Higher ups in working with get visibly annoyed when you start talking about prototypes or trying something out in isolation, they don’t see why you wouldn’t just work with the real codebase and end the project with a PR.

Also seeing a lot of managerial class bypassing the PR system entirely and just committing to main “because it’s faster”.

Now it's possible to toss many more. :)

I think this is nonsense.

Prototyping already existed - how do you think the iPhone came into existence?