5 ms·

That is a valid criticism, but this is basically institutionalized boy scouting, which is a good practice.

• softawre 10y ago
  > institutionalized boy scouting, which is a good practice You brought up the name for it. Okay. Now can we get back to the debate on whether it is a good practice? These people are debating whether boy-scouting is 100% required every time, or whether there are critical issues that require making it sometimes-optional.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > whether there are critical issues that require making it sometimes-optional. There are obviously issues where it would be better to skip it, but that's the wrong question. The question that needs asked is can the organization identify, adopt, and properly execute a system which identifies those cases reliably enough that the benefit of the true positives is not overridden by the costs of the false positives. And, IME, the places that tend to have inflexible policies like this are also places where the answer to that is "hell, no!". Which is demonstrated dramatically (and expensively) everytime someone with who fails to recognize the organizational capacity constraint gets into the right position of authority and tries to implement that kind of flexibility.
• dpritchett 10y ago
  "Leave it better than you found it" is one thing, but "perfect everything you touch or don't touch it at all" is another, vastly more expensive and high-friction thing.
  • x0x0 10y ago
    And hard rules like config files vs hard-coded constants reeks of fetishization of process and rules over judgement. If something has been modified once in 10 years, with no near-term modifications planned, hard coding it seems pretty reasonable.