There is one idea that I often told engineers recently, and I think it deserves a wider audience.
When you do engineering, you have different kinds of tasks. Some tasks are accidents or tactical work. We often call this “fire extinguishing”, especially when the work involves urgent repair or it needs to be done immediately.
Other tasks are strategic. You have collected from your users the information that they need / they want, you have developed a solution, and now you are implementing it - methodically and systematically.
It is important to understand what type of work you are doing at the moment, and think about
it accordingly.
Fires
When you put out the fire, your goal is to put out the fire. You want to make the minimum necessary effort to destroy the fire and return to long-term strategic work. You do not want to build large, complex systems that will live forever, just to put out the fire. During an accident, you make knee, crutch, "quick and dirty" decisions. This does not mean that you should do a bad job. But you should not build a long-lived, highly efficient system to extinguish this particular fire.
Fires come in many forms. Sometimes a management or other team comes to you with an urgent request, with something that needs to be done in the next couple of weeks. What you want to do is figure out how to fulfill this request and remove it from the road in order to return to long-term strategic objectives.
In other cases, you have a real accident, breakdown. It is clear that in this case you must fix the breakdown, and not engage in any nonsense. When everything has broken down, this is not the time to say "well, we need project documentation and let's discuss it next week with our leading developers." In fact, the same is true for any fire: a fire is not the time to apply fundamental methods and software design systems.
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