3 ms·
> The conversation you have is "Boss, I can crank this out quickly but the faster its written the more likely it will have some future problem in it." Not enti
by barefoot 14y ago
> The conversation you have is "Boss, I can crank this out quickly but the faster its written the more likely it will have some future problem in it."
Not entirely sure if this is satire or not but it's a genuine conversation that I've had with a few clients.
I call it "the spectrum of quality" conversation. I can write beautiful unit tested code that will not explode unexpectedly at 3am on a Sunday several years later...but it won't be (relatively) quick to get there.
Alternatively, I can rush through something that will have to be rewritten later and it'll only take me a few hours. Part of me dies writing that type of code but there's a time and a place for it.
You want to hit the afterburner? No problem, but there are consequences.
- edu 14y agoTechnical debt. There's a time and place for it, but as financial debt you'll have to pay it back, with interests. The best thing about the term, is that not technical people know and understand how debt works, so they can make a more or less informed decision and don't get that much surprised in the future when something need a big refactoring :)
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThat is exactly right. One the most interesting things I heard from a departing Google engineer was that he was declaring 'technical bankruptcy.' He was so fed up with hacking things together to make them work and not doing them 'right' that he just couldn't take it any more. So much of the way we work as engineers has analogs in finance that it stuns me some times.