> So what they did was make grunge work an official expectation at every engineering level
IIRC Schrep (https://www.linkedin.com/in/schrep/) at Facebook also introduced a similar concept, dubbing it "Better Engineering", later renaming it to "Engineering Excellence". Every engineer had to do some BE work and show how their work affected the quality of the code base or systems in general.
Opinions are split as to how much that work made an actual difference come performance review time, but FWIW it was one of the semi-mandatory topics one had to address in their self-review (AKA performance axis).
Having time for grunge work has been one of best parts of becoming a manager.
All of the sudden nobody expects me to write code towards that P0 OKR, I get a ton of brownie points for being the manager who chips away on _that_ pile, and it's all small fun and educational tasks that help me to reset my brain between meetings, and most come with very clear instructions.
And as a manager: Knowing how their tech debt pile looks like from the inside: Priceless.
> So what they did was make grunge work an official expectation at every engineering level
IIRC Schrep (https://www.linkedin.com/in/schrep/) at Facebook also introduced a similar concept, dubbing it "Better Engineering", later renaming it to "Engineering Excellence". Every engineer had to do some BE work and show how their work affected the quality of the code base or systems in general.
Opinions are split as to how much that work made an actual difference come performance review time, but FWIW it was one of the semi-mandatory topics one had to address in their self-review (AKA performance axis).
"ChatGPT tells me that debt is". Graeber has you covered here: "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"
Having time for grunge work has been one of best parts of becoming a manager.
All of the sudden nobody expects me to write code towards that P0 OKR, I get a ton of brownie points for being the manager who chips away on _that_ pile, and it's all small fun and educational tasks that help me to reset my brain between meetings, and most come with very clear instructions.
And as a manager: Knowing how their tech debt pile looks like from the inside: Priceless.
I'm confused by the term used here. Do you mean grunt work, aka toil?
Probably. Bloody foreigners.