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I agree - I've worked for a company where there was zero pressure to deliver and an emphasis on quality. This led to endless discussions about minutiae code det

by tziki 8y ago

I agree - I've worked for a company where there was zero pressure to deliver and an emphasis on quality. This led to endless discussions about minutiae code details and long debates about best practises. We ended up rewriting some parts of the code base because someone suggested it wasn't exemplary even though it was definitely fine. The thing is, good code rarely looks stellar. It looks like code which you understand without much trouble, and usually there's more than one way to make it that way. If you get caught up into the trap of thinking you have deliver something amazing but don't understand what amazing really looks like, you're in for a lot of wasted resources. After the aforementioned company I worked for a startup, and man was it a joy to actually ship code that affected lives. Sure, the code wasn't always the most polished, but being trusted to find the right balance between technical debt for speed of execution felt great. Sometimes saying 'things should be done right no matter how long it takes' just means the management is unable to balance technical debt with other objectives.

ken 8y ago
Two common themes I'm seeing in all these comments, which are especially clear in this one: 1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not). 2. In software, nobody can seem to agree on what exactly "quality" means. Software is still such a young field that nobody can seem to agree on anything at all. It reminds me of other fields 100 years ago, where you could just try anything and if it seemed to work that was fine. > Sometimes saying 'things should be done right no matter how long it takes' just means the management is unable to balance technical debt with other objectives. In this case, I would say they'd done such a good job with managing technical debt that they knew they could say "as long as it takes" on a micro-level, and be confident that nothing would blow up on a macro-level. This was a physical system that has annual (or semi-annual) inspections by a third party. Can you say the same about your software system?
- scarface74 8y ago
  1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not) I’m often bemoaning the “Silicon Valley Bubble” that people are caught in on HN. I guess I fell into the related “Software Developers Bubble”..... Point taken.

by tziki 8y ago

ken 8y ago

Two common themes I'm seeing in all these comments, which are especially clear in this one: 1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not). 2. In software, nobody can seem to agree on what exactly "quality" means. Software is still such a young field that nobody can seem to agree on anything at all. It reminds me of other fields 100 years ago, where you could just try anything and if it seemed to work that was fine. > Sometimes saying 'things should be done right no matter how long it takes' just means the management is unable to balance technical debt with other objectives. In this case, I would say they'd done such a good job with managing technical debt that they knew they could say "as long as it takes" on a micro-level, and be confident that nothing would blow up on a macro-level. This was a physical system that has annual (or semi-annual) inspections by a third party. Can you say the same about your software system?

scarface74 8y ago
1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not) I’m often bemoaning the “Silicon Valley Bubble” that people are caught in on HN. I guess I fell into the related “Software Developers Bubble”..... Point taken.