4 ms·

It's not just files. Anything originally designed as a temporary stop-gap has a habit of becoming permanent. I first learned this about portable classrooms, the

• Aaargh20318 11y ago
  There are few things as permanent as a temporary solution. The problem with a temporary solution is that it makes the problem go away, so suddenly there is no longer any incentive to fix it properly.
  • Natanael_L 11y ago
    How about this formulation? "Any quick fix that suppress the feeling of emergency will become permanent"
    • Natanael_L 11y ago
      (since I can't update the previous comment anymore) As a corollary, I wrote a few variants of a suggestion for an anti-quick fix permanence policy: A: Ugly problems gets fixes first, so make your quick fixes ugly. B: Every quick fix must be made exponentially uglier than its degree of crappiness. C: Make your fixes transparent; have your fixes let the symptoms shine through from the original problem. And if the problem is silent, have the quick fix generate noise. Definitions: * Ugliness = how bad it looks to everybody involved, including non-technical bosses. * Crappiness = how risky / exploit prone / buggy / inefficient / hard to maintain it is. Justification: to maintain an appropriate degree of a sense of emergency. Two days of unplanned downtime is more than twice as bad as one day (thus the exponent), as costs often grow exponentially. The apparent ugliness of the fix itself should drive everybody to implement a better fix, as they all want to get rid of it right away and NOT put something worse in its place. Physical analogy: a lobby's unstable ceiling held up by a temporary pillar will remain unfixed with the pillar standing if the pillar gets painted, but will be urgently fixed if the pillar stays looking ugly.
      • not_kurt_godel 11y ago
        Here's my solution: Do it right the first time.
        • Natanael_L 11y ago
          Absolutely, if you have no deadline.