Satire
It's Just a Small Change
Five words. Every engineer's blood pressure goes up 20 points.
The message arrives at 4:47 PM on a Friday.
"Hey, can we make a small change? Shouldn't take long."
What Actually Happens
The change requires modifying a table that three other services depend on. One of those services hasn't been touched in two years. The person who built it left the company. The documentation says "see John" but John is gone. The test coverage is 0%.
You make the change. Something else breaks. That thing is in production.
It is now 9 PM on a Friday.
“Nothing that starts with 'just' has ever been just anything. I've logged this as a P0.”
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
You do a dependency trace before touching anything. You identify what the change actually affects, state it clearly, and give a realistic time window — not the one they want to hear. You never ship a Friday-evening change to a shared database without a rollback plan written before you start. If the request carries the word "just", treat it as a signal to look harder, not move faster.
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