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People are bad a predicting future. Especially when this predicting is done in 5 minutes before implementing something and not dedicated activity which include

People are bad a predicting future. Especially when this predicting is done in 5 minutes before implementing something and not dedicated activity which includes interviewing of users and domain experts. I've seen this many times: programmer is asked to solve a small and well defined problem. Instead programmer generalizes it and makes something more universal with the requested feature as a special case. More often than not nothing except this special case is used. Or working on some new project they add a feature which looks useful in theory, but ends up being rarely/never used. It may look easy to implement initially, but over the years maintenance cost can be much higher.

pipingdog 5y ago
People are amazing at predicting the future, and in some ways we are better at it than remembering the past. That's because we use the same machinery to do both. We partly remember the future, and predict the past. This ability breaks down with complexity and abstractness, as well as with novelty, all of which are involved in software (I can tell you that the sun will come up tomorrow, and where I should move my hand to catch a ball, but I can't predict all of the defects my software will have--though if it involves X.509 certificates, I can tell you exactly when a particular sort of outage will occur)