Go ahead, write the “stupid” code

Prototypes (start ups) rarely have the luxury of "getting it right", their actual goal is "getting it out there FAST to capture the market (and have it working enough to keep the market)"

(Some - apologies but I'm not a game dev enough to be able to say what types this applies to) Game devs - they're more or less build it, ship it, and be done with it, players tend to be forgiving of most bugs, and they move on to the next shiny thing long before it's time to fix all the things.

Once the product has traction in the market, and you have paying customers, then it's time to deal with the load (scale up) and bugs, I recall reading somewhere that it's probably best to drop the start up team, they did their job (and are now free to move on to the next brilliant idea), and replace them with a scale up team, who will do the planning, architecting, and preparation for the long term life of the software.

I think that that approach would have worked for Facebook (for example) they had their PHP prototype that captured the market very quickly, and (IMO) they should have moved through to a scale up team (who could have used the original code as a facade, strangling it to replace it with something funky (Java/C++ would have been what was available at the time, but Go would be what I would suggest now)

> There’s a lot of “theatre” in planning, writing endless tickets and refining them for WEEKS before actually starting to write code, in a way that’s actively harmful for building software.

I'd love to have a "high paying job" where I am allowed to start prototyping and modelling the problem and then iteratively keep on improving it into fully functional solution.

I won't deny that the snowballing of improvements and functional completeness manifests as acceleration of "delivery speed" and as a code-producing experience is extremely enjoyable. Depth-first traversal into curiosity driven problem solving is a very pleasurable activity.

However, IME in real world, someone up the chain is going to ask "when will you deliver this". I have ever only once been in a privileged enough a position in a job to say "I am on it and I will finish it when I finish it... and it will be really cool"

Planning and task breakdown, as a developer, is pretty much like my insurance policy. Because when someone up the chain (all the way down to my direct manager) comes asking "How much progress you have made ?" I can say (OR "present the data" as it is called in a certain company ?) "as per the agreed plan, out of the N things, I have done k (I would highly encourage everyone to participate in the "planning theatre" and play your "role".

OR, if possible start something of your own and do it the way you always wanted to do it.

Also, 2010 was just yesterday my young friend :)

"Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go".