4 ms·

> revolving around the idea that the act of coding was the expensive part rather than the application complexity. I just can’t wrap my head around this idea. I

• acdha 6y ago
  There’s definitely room to shift the work but I think it’s really easy to look at the amount of time spent writing code after the specification is “done” and say that it’s overhead without questioning how much of it was really due to errors, gaps, or misunderstandings in the spec (thinking memorably of a couple of projects “overruns” where the managers who thought the plan was done were wildly out of touch with their direct reports who’d been excluded from the planning process). I think a lot of business people also liked the idea of having one expensive architect giving diagrams to cheaper coders (probably in a different county), avoiding needing to give higher pay and social status than they needed to offer to be able to hire decent programmers. Something like UML is appealing if you want something you can look at to say it’s ready to hand over to be implemented and the numbers salespeople toss around for projected cost savings can make it appealing to pretend really hard that it’s that simple.