81–90 of 205 posts
Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enterprise projects have sprawling budgets and indefinite timelines, but nobody who has worked on line-of-business software would suggest that the outcomes are anywhere close to perfect.
Not implying that. Just that her way of thinking is a much better fit in that environment.
Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.
This was my thought as well. And don't work at a small company or startup; go work in a mission critical industry such as aerospace where perfection is the rule of law.
Those other industries? They are already quite mature, and are operating on razor-thin margins, often in the 5% range.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" A good carpenter wants to build a solid house even if no one will ever see its frame. Ditto to an auto engineer at BMW, or a hardware engineer at Apple, or a mechanical engineer at Boeing. Why do software engineers break this mold? " They don't, but a good carpenter is not going to try to figure out how to make every single wall perfectly 90 degrees, etc. He's going to take a level, see if the thing is in a center…
Instead, you sat on a mountain and meditated upon your code, until you understood it well enough to fix the problem and try again. :)
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Today's "quick MVP we can incrementally improve" is tomorrow's "unmaintainable legacy codebase." But sure, it'll be different this time.
Legacy codebases make money. The engineer anxiety about them is myopic and ignorant of business realities. If you can code something quickly and well enough that it doesn't immediately collapse under its own weight, you have succeeded. The fact that a codebase has existed long enough to become "legacy" means it did a good enough job to stay alive.
Far from. The worry is not "this code is old." Plenty of old code (especially boring old code) is cranking along just fine.
The worry is that if an old, abstruse system stops working or has a critical security bug, there's a real risk that nobody will be able to put the fire out.
I apologize if you assumed this was a story about a difference rooted in race and gender, because it is not. That’s not where we are going. That's not an apology. You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obt…
Personally I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the author. Some of us are builders. Some of us are growers. Some of us are finishers. Unfortunately the former two often unintentionally conspire to make life difficult for the latter, whether by poor architecture, bad code, or simple lack of prioritization. That is what the author spoke to (at least, that was my takeaway) and that was what the headline lead to. Her stops along the way at the gender and racial discrimination questions were also relevant, but not where the story ends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm a white male - a right-wing white male - and I agree with her. Why do you need to include that? She very deliberately said that this is not an article about race, gender, or politics.
The article author spends numerous paragraphs establishing her identify to the reader as a womain in tech before explaining that this isn't the issue she has with tech. The comment author has merely done the same?
Most people that complain about shipping the imperfect solution are not aware how inefficient is striving for perfection in the software world. Personally, I have never seen rumination on every nook-and-corner of the product yielding something fruitful. In fact, it invariably results in the opposite — solving the wrong problems and then, solving the real problems that you never thought would've existed. Rinse. Repeat…
Perfection is the opposite extreme from minimum viable product. There could be a "happy medium" where a ship schedule incorporates a reasonable level of quality in v1. Minimum viable is too often implemented as ship as fast as possible, and viable gets perverted into first post release patch.
(12) Perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left
to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.