I wasn't here for the crazy.

I first coined the phrase “I wasn’t here for the crazy” almost a decade ago.

One of the easiest things to do as an engineer coming into a new team with any legacy whatsoever is to bash the people who were there before you. What kind of idiot would do X? If only they’d known Y, they could have… And so on.

Resist the temptation.

Confession time: Once, I was required to essentially implement cron in Python. I objected, I provided technical reasoning as to why it was a bad idea, and in the end I basically recreated cron in Python. I’m absolutely certain my creation was worse than the battle-hardened cron. I don’t know if that code survives today, but anyone picking it up after me would likely think me an idiot. Who in their right mind wouldn’t just use cron?

Listen, I agree with that engineer coming in behind me, but… seriously… the situation was crazy. I had the best of intent. I didn’t want to do what I eventually did. It simply needed to get done.

Fine. To be fair, I am ashamed… a little. I’m much less ashamed now than I was then. Why?

Well, first, I’ve grown a tiny bit. I mean, let’s not get it twisted, I’m still happy to debate the finer points of making technically superior decisions… I just can now accept the tech isn’t the most important thing for a business. That’s not new, just something I didn’t understand early in my career. I’ve written previously about how the tech doesn’t matter. The fact is, software is simply a tool to help solve problems, and businesses exists to solve problems in a way valuable enough for people to pay for those solutions. Repeat after me, it… does… not… matter if everything is bubblegum and duct-taped together.

Second, and more to the point, you don’t know what was going on. In my cron example, there were actually some technical hurdles we’d encountered in trying to use cron in that specific context. If I could have simply gotten cron to work, we would have used that solution, but at that time, I, at least, couldn’t get it to work. So, if the person who came behind me could, that’s freaking awesome. I’d be the first one to celebrate ripping out my monstrosity and replacing it with cron (or now a systemd timer). (As an aside, I love deleting code, even when it’s mine.)

I wasn’t here for the crazy.

Now, I truly believe it’ll be easier for you to be happy if you give the folks who came before you the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it’s still possible they were idiots or ignorant. It’s possible they could have made better choices. But… maybe… they made the best of a bad situation. Maybe that decision saved the business or a release or they tried other solutions and settled on what worked. Regardless, if you can now improve on it, great. No need to cast shade. Want to prove you’re brilliant? Do it on your own merits, not by taking someone else down. If you’re that much better, it should be easy.