Previously, on SICPers, I wrote that I make mistakes for a living. But making mistakes is no good if nobody’s cleaning up after them, so I also fix things. Whatever gets in my team’s way, it’s my responsibility as their lead to make sure that it’s no longer in their way.
Whether it’s a process we instituted that slows us down, some technical debt that gets in the way of new development, or some infrastructure not behaving itself, it needs to go, and I either need to clear it out or find somebody to do it for us. On my team I’ve been nicknamed “Mister Fix-It” as a result of my policy of getting rid of everybody else’s impediments before doing my own work, and we even have a Fix-It support queue just like our customer support queue. Except it’s not our customers I’m supporting, it’s my colleagues. Tickets in my queue range from “this script doesn’t handle this case and did the wrong thing when I tried to do a build” to “merge these three repos into a monorepo”. It doesn’t matter, it’s in our way, so it needs shifting.
Or does it? Is it, in fact, in the way, or are we solving the wrong problem? Some of the tickets in the Fix-It queue magically transmogrified from “Fix This” to “Measure This”: let’s discover where the problem really is before we solve something else.
