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> Poor design decisions and shortcuts are sexy because they give you a small amount of value right now (not having to do the work to architect things properly),
by bluesnowmonkey 12y ago
> Poor design decisions and shortcuts are sexy because they give you a small amount of value right now (not having to do the work to architect things properly), and you dramatically discount the value you would get in the future by doing it right the first time.
What do you call this bias? People like to think that if a different person had been in charge, or if they'd had more time, then things could have been done "properly". But really there is no "proper" way to do anything in software engineering. Every decision is a judgement call. Everywhere you look it's shades of gray. Especially without the benefit of hindsight.
- jdmichal 12y agoHonestly, I call it "lack of proper documentation of decisions." It's pretty systemic throughout software engineering, myself included. It's why we seem doomed to "refactor" current solutions, only to end up with the same mess at the end. We see the 80% use-case, think we can do better, then by the time we hit those 20% edge cases, the code is as bad as when we started. This would be avoided if all the decisions and use-cases leading to the current mess were well documented, which would allow people to actually engineer a better solution with all the use-cases, or just leave it alone because they can't.