Engineering managers will say things like -
- "I'll let the team decide what's best for them" & "code quality is our primary goal" -
but then they'll shoot down any & all requests to go back to some old piece of code and refactor/clean it, because of "deadlines".
Hypocrites, all of them.

Okay it was trap, the frustration is understandable, but... "code quality as primary goal" ? How was this even believable in the first place?

They have to sell something to someone and make money. To buy themselves those fancy boats but also to pay you and the guy next to you this precious salary. Maybe, most likely, it would be profitable to invest in better code on the long run, maybe not - but that doesn't count because they have to deliver now. Pay you now. And especially take this special deal for the new yacht as long as it's hot.

There is no alternative - not delivering would lead to no money and no clean code as well.

Sell shit now. Pay Bills now. And this is the primary goal and ever will be.

@horus After reading your post one could think that OP is working in some startup which barely stays afloat and survives cheque to cheque on monthly basis and devs are shitting out ground breaking bleeding edge world changing features on monthly basis.

Why so dramatic? Relax. In reality when u see actual monthly output of this kind of companies its fucking hilarious. 6 weeks to add some dumb popup or do minor changes. Ground breaking!

I'm sure his company wouldnt close down if at least 1-2 sprints would be dedicated to refactor long standing issues.

But @zemaitis what about the fucking boat for the ceo?

@horus Yeah you got a point here... Fcking rat race with false sense of urgency

@zemaitis that's exactly right - we have a 6 week cycle and the manager has promised that he'll reserve 20% of each Sprint for handling tech debt - but those are fake promises, because when the time comes to work on that 20%, there's always a "critical" feature to ship.
Like I said, hypocrites, all of them.