One of my coworkers once told me to learn to live with “what it is”, I really appreciate it as it reveals some of my weakness that I used to be blind about. But there’s also the other side of spectrum I’d like to share, which is don’t confuse compromise with indifference. Compromise is hard, it’s about weighing trade-offs of different options and then determine a course of action. Engineering is about trade-offs, same applies to life made up of all sorts of decisions. Therefore, there’s no question that compromise is inevitable when it comes to problem solving, the challenging part lies on where to “draw the line” for solutions to be considered as reasonably good.
I have always been working in product teams, but with a keen interest to learn about how things work behind the scene. It serves me well to form a more solid understanding of how stuff gets connected to each other, but it also exposes me to much more “broken window” experiences. You might not need dev proxy was one of those deeply flawed experiences that I’ve faced, that is the login flow for product development was broken while all product teams work as if it is normal for years.
I told people that this should be fixed. Not surprisingly, I received a few pushbacks to “learn to live with it”. No ask about what’s broken, nor why I’m thinking it’s broken. My opinion is simply being ignored rather than being challenged. Not until I saw some “veteran” of the team start to teach new faces of the team to setup projects with the “workaround” as the “de-facto” standard, I decided to fix it by myself. It worked and I came up with a compromised solution. Furthermore, the solution successfully caught the attention of the infrastructure team and we did a quick sync up and worked out a better solution together. The problem got solved without much compromise even.
I did this quietly a couple months ago, so that no one really cares about it besides their de-facto standard way of doing things perhaps needs an update. But this time, it’s my turn to be indifferent as the problem is already gone.