I don’t think he’s a lawyer.

I get that a lot when I put butter on my pizza crust, I mean it is bread?

It is funny because it is the opposite actually. Former senates and presidents actually clashed over foreign policies, it is only in recent times that presidents were more or less left to decide. So, I guess there is a bit of projection going on here.

Congress has the power to declare war. The president being commander-in-chief does not mean he can do whatever he please with the U.S army as its own personal force. The president is meant to follow the constitution, even as commander. If the president ignores treaties and war declarations, I would argue the president is the one violating the separation of powers, and not congress by hypothetically enforcing the powers given to them by the constitution. By this logic, whoever controller the army should have absolute power, being commander-in-chief and all. I like how you slipped past my initial post by completely ignoring that the constitution grants congress influence over foreign policies by citing the president control over the armed forces as this unalienable right. Why have treaties then? Why have declaration of war? I think you might be slightly biased in your argument. The president was never the sole responsible for foreign policies, even though the executive branch had a lot of influence over those in recent times.

Article II section 2 of the constitution requires approval from the senate to ratify treaties, which is then up to the president to ratify and implement. Both branches of the government are supposed to work together to establish foreign policies, this is part of the check and balances. If you have sources interpreting article II section 2 differently I’d be curious to see.

Whatever social economic model which can funnel power and authority to the very top is bond to ruin us. Humans are too greedy to sit at the top of such hierarchies.

I have seen a doc about Home Depot (not the pictured store) some time ago. Apparently the overstocked facade was a big deal because those big stores want you to think they have everything that can possibly exist in their inventory so you only always go there and make no further stops.

Of course, it’s smoke and mirror and a lot of stores adopted the big warehouse style for the same reasons. Some stores have legit empty boxes filled with crap all over. If you ever went into one of those store looking for something very specific tho, it is pretty apparent that they only overstock a few profitable items and the rest is no better, or worse than smaller locally-owned shops inventory-wise. Only exception around here would be Costco, which is a.legit warehouse.

This but non-ironically.

I’ve seen this play out a couple time. I agree about a lot of what you said and this is indeed true that you can have very senior and very knowledgeable devs basically “hack” or “bulldoze” their way into a backlog, I would personally argue that this is not a decent or desirable behavior.

There is no such thing as “small finition”. Making sure that a change or a feature works all the way through is not finition, it is core to the task, and you can’t expect someone else to digest and do the latter half of the work without being in your head.

I guess I am too lazy to type out all the examples with the downfall, but basically if you allow this, you will be shielding a senior from his own butched work, and lets be honest, most people who do this skip the “boring” work for their own selfish reasons. If they want to split the task and have you fix the tests, have them spell it out and justify it.

Management might not understand what is going on, all they might see is a superstar flying through the backlog, while everyone else struggle because they’re constantly fixing this guy’s shit. This rarely lead to good engineering, or team dynamic, or team management, and of course you end up with this one guy claiming credit for so much shit, while other team members stagnate. Unfortunately appearance is a thing in dev work, as much as I wish it wasn’t.

What you seem to be describing is one big class with lots of responsabilities, and not circular dependency. Personally, I don’t think it is ideal, and I don’t know about your specific case so I could be wrong, but I have never seen a legit case for bloated classes. That being said, making a big class is still much better than splitting it into inter-dependant classes. Classes that know each other are so cohesive that they might as well be the same class anyway.

To add onto the circular dependency problem, it is not just about readability and cognitive load (though there is some of that), but cyclic dependencies actively break things, and make it much harder to manage the lifecycle of a program. No dependency injection, poor memory management, long compile times. It is a huge hack, and I understand that you think it can be the proper solution sometime, but it is really just a bad thing to do, and it will bite you some day. And I am assuming here that you’re using a language that is friendly, in some languages you won’t even compile past a certain point, and good luck cleaning up that mess.

It does not get more complicated to split your example. What gets more complicated is giving all sort of unrelated responsabilities to a single class, simply because it is the path of least resistance.

In your example, all you need is an extra module listening for configuration changes and reacting to it. This way you leave your context-specific logic out of your data model, no need for cyclic dependency. There are so many downsides to cyclic dependency, to justify it because splitting your logic is “too complicated” really isn’t a strong argument.