4 ms·
His story will resonate with anyone who's written software for business. At my very first "real" programming job, my boss thought that this was how you motivat
by phaedrus 16y ago
His story will resonate with anyone who's written software for business.
At my very first "real" programming job, my boss thought that this was how you motivate programmers - take whatever the real deadline is and cut the time in half, on the theory that the programmers will take twice as long as you give them anyway. I was pretty upset by this, because by being lied to about what the real timeframe was, we made a number of unsound technical decisions thinking we didn't have time to do things right. I don't think being lied to caused us to magically be able to get an app out the door faster - what being lied to about the schedule actually caused was for us to produce code that wasn't a good foundation for future changes.
- jacquesm 16y agoIn practice though, given twice the amount of time there will not magically be a twice as good solution. And many times you'd find that the solution would actually be exactly the same. Give me 24 hours to do a job and I'll do it, give me two weeks and I'll procrastinate for 13 days and then do it in the last 24 hours. That's exaggerating, but not by much and I'm not sure I like to know myself that much.
- ido 16y agoI think I had the same boss as you in my first "real" job...Thankfully the experience taught me to choose my employers more wisely in all subsequent jobs.
- elviejo 16y agoThis is a big dilemma for me. Because shouldn't making the code the right way be faster?... This is something that gave me grief for a long time until I realized that I was thinking about running a marathon not a sprint.