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The problems with that position and how your phrased it are that it is wrong, sounds condescending, is an easy way out and more importantly, completely ignores

The problems with that position and how your phrased it are that it is wrong, sounds condescending, is an easy way out and more importantly, completely ignores the real issue. And the real issue is time vs result. That's the essence of worse is better. It's the well documented fact of diminishing return and exponential cost of additional quality. You can deliver N features over a given fixed time. Given the urve of quality vs time, there is a true sweet spot where your maximize value, for whatever criteria you want for the value. Spending too much time on fewer items or too few time on too many will respectively waste time on unnecessary polish and deliver stoo many items of no value. There is a sweet spot.

pdimitar 8y ago
> There is a sweet spot. There is, but it definitely is NOT at one of the extreme ends of the curve where experienced bean-counters will negotiate down the engineering effort (and thus money) to the absolutely minimum necessary for the project not to implode 2 days after release. Truth is, at one point in your career you have to start pushing back against those bean-counters. They will never get tired, and they are everywhere. At certain point you take a stand, put your foot down and say: "No, this will NOT be done in 2 days. It will be done in 5 and thus it won't have to be patched 10 times in the space of a week. If you don't like it, my resignation is ready." You would be surprised how often that works. Many of the business types and managers are bullies only because nobody ever fought back. ...Or you could take a more diplomatic, but still firm, stance. Like "the overall cost of this feature will be much lower if I work on this for 5 days instead of 2". But IMO that almost never flies so I became blunt with time and I simply don't care. I passed five job offers lately for similar reasons and I couldn't be happier about it.

pdimitar 8y ago

> There is a sweet spot. There is, but it definitely is NOT at one of the extreme ends of the curve where experienced bean-counters will negotiate down the engineering effort (and thus money) to the absolutely minimum necessary for the project not to implode 2 days after release. Truth is, at one point in your career you have to start pushing back against those bean-counters. They will never get tired, and they are everywhere. At certain point you take a stand, put your foot down and say: "No, this will NOT be done in 2 days. It will be done in 5 and thus it won't have to be patched 10 times in the space of a week. If you don't like it, my resignation is ready." You would be surprised how often that works. Many of the business types and managers are bullies only because nobody ever fought back. ...Or you could take a more diplomatic, but still firm, stance. Like "the overall cost of this feature will be much lower if I work on this for 5 days instead of 2". But IMO that almost never flies so I became blunt with time and I simply don't care. I passed five job offers lately for similar reasons and I couldn't be happier about it.