When work drives you crazy ...

So this week at work was not one of the best, or to be more accurate, it stunk. A few things went wrong and management panics, needs things fixed ASAP. What they like to forget is that all the problems we are seeing now were foreseeable. In fact, I and a few others even made proposals on how to fix it. Nothing of course happened back then, but now as the problems keep occurring, the cries for fixes get louder and louder. And some even recommend now what we proposed months and sometimes years ago. So you may ask, why did we never implement our recommendations?
The answer is that my project is notoriously understaffed when it comes to good programmers that can go with an idea and make it happen. Without requiring handholding and another PY to fix what they did. The reality is, that for every capable programmer there are about three to four who have no clue what they are doing. On top of that, there is more and more people who are watching what is being done. Right now it feels like a pyramid org chart tat is upside down. Tons of management and other useless positions for every few people who actually do work and can do the work. I have a job that should be done by at least 3 good people and to do it really well, 5 to 6 would be the right number. Yet, for the past few years I and at most one inexperienced or part-time programmer helped. What does that mean for the quality of the code? Well, you have to cut corners. You have to go with solutions that will work but are easy to implement in a relatively short amount of time. They are often not the best solutions or the ones that should be used. (To give you an idea what my job is: I am trying to write code to maintain a web scale full-text index on too few machines ... ) The problem with this chronic lack of resources is, that over time, you end up in situations where you keep patching, and patching, and patching ... It is time for a rewrite. But for that I will not have the time, I already know that. And that bugs me!