I make a point of trying to unplug on Saturdays. Part of this ritual includes getting my steps in—of which I try to get twenty thousand while I am at it. At least sixteen thousand of them come from a single hiking exercise where I walk to a nearby regional park and walk in a loop on some rather rattle-snakey trails before walking home.
Imagine my surprise when I spotted an interesting-looking fence post on the way to the park that appeared much shorter than its peers. My photograph does not do it justice. The exciting part about this repair job on the fence is the blog post opportunity it created for me.
This picture lets me ask you: How do you decide how much time and resources to spend fixing issues in production?
In an ideal world, you would want to replace this shortened pole completely. That means you would need to dig up the pole, transport a replacement pole to this location which is nearly one hundred yards away from a nearby parking lot or road, and then somehow drive it successfully into the ground.
Two of these three steps involve some kind of machinery and/or transportation. You will need to bring the post to a nearby road and then have a machine of some kind that will drive it into the ground. You might convince someone to carry it from the back of a pickup truck to that location while you are at it. This is the work of two or three people, one large transport, and one pile-driver machine. If you were looking at the costs of this enterprise, you are likely well into the single digits of thousands of dollars now.
The alternative is for one person with a chainsaw and a power drill to cut a new groove further down the post and bore a hole into it to attach the bolt. This is likely about an hour of work and probably the work of one person with a small bag of tools.
It does not look perfect, and almost nobody will care. It will do the job the previous fence did.
One of the roles of engineering leadership is to decide whether to do the patch job on a pole with a quick fix like this or a deeper refactor that costs more time and resources to solve the issue more completely. Most of the time, the deeper fix to an issue like this is best done after thinking about it more deeply and probably modifying two or three other problems simultaneously.
I am quite pleased with myself. A passing observation on my extensive weekly hike purchased a week-long backlog extension for my blog. I have a reasonably deep queue of subjects to entertain you all, and every time I can extend it, I feel like I have accomplished something.
I feel like celebrating. What better way to celebrate than to order a delicious boxed set of Tortuga Rum Cakes? Please click on this affiliate link and purchase this amazing assembly of delectable treats to participate in the festivities!
