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One word: "Plastics", no, actually it's "Job Security". There is an incentive in ANY profession to recommend or encourage more of your own labor. For example, a

by tabtab 8y ago

One word: "Plastics", no, actually it's "Job Security". There is an incentive in ANY profession to recommend or encourage more of your own labor. For example, a surgeon is more likely to recommend surgery to solve a problem than a non-surgeon. This bias isn't necessarily intentional: human nature (competitive evolution) just naturally pushes us to interpret the world in a way that makes ourselves as valuable as possible. In IT, complex solutions that we create or learn keep out competition. "Only Bob knows how to fix this monstrosity" is a common pattern. Simplicity should be added to the employee evaluation process. This includes parsimony in both features (YAGNI) and in how the features are coded. Further, avoid "eye candy" UI gimmicks that add complexity and fragility. End-users often love them, but they are often a longer-term maintenance headache. Beauty ain't free.

majewsky 8y ago
> This bias isn't necessarily intentional: human nature (competitive evolution) just naturally pushes us to interpret the world in a way that makes ourselves as valuable as possible. For the surgeon example, the simpler explanation is that, given a particular ailment, they just know only the surgical treatment, not the alternative drug-based therapy. Or if they know, they know it way back in their head and don't think of it unless explicitly prompted, whereas the surgical procedure is probably recent experience. I could also see this apply to IT. Given some problem, maybe there would be a simpler solution if I implemented this particular problem in, say, Python, but I'll implement it in Go because I work with Go a lot and all its idioms are much more salient in my mind.
- tabtab 8y ago
  That's a variation of "if all you know is hammers, then everything looks like a nail". That's certainly an aspect of it, but I'm not convinced it's the entire story. It would be interesting to see studies on how prior careers/specialities affects one's decisions in new specialities.

by tabtab 8y ago

majewsky 8y ago

> This bias isn't necessarily intentional: human nature (competitive evolution) just naturally pushes us to interpret the world in a way that makes ourselves as valuable as possible. For the surgeon example, the simpler explanation is that, given a particular ailment, they just know only the surgical treatment, not the alternative drug-based therapy. Or if they know, they know it way back in their head and don't think of it unless explicitly prompted, whereas the surgical procedure is probably recent experience. I could also see this apply to IT. Given some problem, maybe there would be a simpler solution if I implemented this particular problem in, say, Python, but I'll implement it in Go because I work with Go a lot and all its idioms are much more salient in my mind.

tabtab 8y ago
That's a variation of "if all you know is hammers, then everything looks like a nail". That's certainly an aspect of it, but I'm not convinced it's the entire story. It would be interesting to see studies on how prior careers/specialities affects one's decisions in new specialities.