New and/or Improved

There is a balancing act that I'm not sure how to do.

People want new functionality. New abilities, a new look, the new shiny. To an extent, as developers, we owe it to our audience to provide this. This is what we pay for attention. This is how we keep our application from getting stale, from being cloned (only better), and how we earn our daily bread.

As developers, sometimes we reach a point where we feel we need to rewrite some of the underlayers in order to support more functionality. This is how we keep code mainatainable, how we add scalability, and how we make sure we can keep adding functionality.

The problem comes when the two are out of balance. And I don't know how to solve that. I see the problem from one perspective: We need good underlying code to be able to scale and to add features and to give people the new shiny. I feel like without this, we're burning time and effort on things that should be easy.

But I'm not in charge. The people in charge understand this to a point, but often, I feel like they don't understand the problem until it becomes critical, and then they just want quick fixes. But, then, as I've pointed out, I'm biased. I think they they are too fixated on the new shiny, and allow the code to rust underneath.

Now, let me be clear. This is not a condemnation of my current employer. This is not a condemnation of my past employers. This is a trend I see everywhere. As a programmer now, I'm under the gun to deliver new functionality. As a consultant, we would slap a new coat of paint on older software that was perhaps not the ideal solution for the client. When I worked retail, the stock room and overstock were the last things cleaned and organized, until we couldn't find any more USB cables. Then cleaning was critical.

So how, as developers, do we strike the balance between new and improved? In my current position, I'm trying to combine the two, and improve where I'm creating new. But this doesn't fix core code that isn't touched often. So what is the real solution?

No, seriously, folks. If you have an answer, leave it in the comments. I really want to know.