3 ms·

I'm currently working at a startup where we have a few developer in their 40's or maybe 50's (not sure how old some of them are really), but what I see is that

I'm currently working at a startup where we have a few developer in their 40's or maybe 50's (not sure how old some of them are really), but what I see is that the market and investors are rewarding us for "moving fast with broken things". For example, we have no plan for handling unicode, and when things break people just try random mixes of encoding, decoding, dropping characters, etc, until the thing works this one time. Subtle issues like this go deep in our system, and yet it apparently looks good to our investors and customers. We get out the features they need quickly, but people will be cursing our names for decades because of the technical debt we create. Maybe this is just because of my current situation, but it seems like the market rewards energetic programmers who can hack something together and constantly monitor and fix little bugs by hand any hour day or night. If this is what the market is rewarding then it seems legitimate to hire a bunch of cheap, young, energetic developers instead of more experienced developers.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
Don't you think the amount of time spent fixing it properly is less than the sum of the time spent making a hacky solution and then playing whack-a-mole repeatedly with the bugs?
- Jare 9y ago
  It's not about thinking, it's about feeling. If half-baked but apparently working features inspire confidence and are perceived as progress by clients and investors, then that perception will drive the rewards and thus the process. The phrase around 1999 was "who cares if it crashes randomly, the user will just reload the page." Shortly afterwards, amount of bugs fixed becomes an additional metric of success, so delivering less features that also come with less bugs means hitting your success metric twice. Sad, but remember that many startups never deliver profits, AKA actual tangible value, before they exit.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

Don't you think the amount of time spent fixing it properly is less than the sum of the time spent making a hacky solution and then playing whack-a-mole repeatedly with the bugs?

Jare 9y ago
It's not about thinking, it's about feeling. If half-baked but apparently working features inspire confidence and are perceived as progress by clients and investors, then that perception will drive the rewards and thus the process. The phrase around 1999 was "who cares if it crashes randomly, the user will just reload the page." Shortly afterwards, amount of bugs fixed becomes an additional metric of success, so delivering less features that also come with less bugs means hitting your success metric twice. Sad, but remember that many startups never deliver profits, AKA actual tangible value, before they exit.