
The Ikea Effect in Software - khasan222
https://medium.com/@khasan222/the-ikea-effect-on-software-95240dd58a3
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tritium
Man, it is so _not_ about the IKEA effect.

This isn't about some puppy-dog infatuation with a spice rack or a bird house.
It's about having your fucking time wasted, when you could have been out doing
pretty much anything except coaxing some shitty interpreter to JIT compile a
blob into some blinky lights for a herd of indecisive squawking ostrichs, amid
their kangaroo court pecking order.

Hours of my life gone. And for what? A clicky-doo button at a company that
might not exist in 10 years?

~~~
Camillo
Hey, it's a job. If your company wants you to build something useless, and it
is not your responsibility to determine whether the idea is sound or not, just
build it.

Of course, this decreases the immaterial part of your value equation, so the
company needs to pay you more to compensate. This is the part most companies
fail to understand.

~~~
tritium
Okay, bake me 100 of your best cakes by tomorrow morning, and watch me flush
them down the toilet, or alternatively, throw them in your face, depending on
my opinion of their decorations. Now let's continue with this arrangement,
every day, for 5 years.

Your response might be "Please pay me enough, and of course I will." or "Hey,
you paid for the cakes, what do I care?"

So, how much does five years of your life cost? Is that what developers make?
What else would you throw five years away on for that money? Would you rob a
bank, and do a five year prison sentence for the same amount?

At some point the trade between effort and wasted time gets negotiated by
qualifiers. These kinds of things do start to matter, eventually.

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wtracy
Not only does being around objective machines all day long not make us more
objective, I think it has the opposite effect.

Specifically, programmers like to perceive themselves as being objective and
logical. This opens a giant blind spot toward the biases that we do have. The
resulting cognitive dissonance allows all kinds of irrational beliefs to
fester.

I used to think that the most wonderful thing about working in engineering was
that engineering organizations are meritocracies. Then I realized that a
organization that genuinely _believes_ itself to be a meritocracy while being
rife with nepotism is actually much worse than an organization where cronyism
happens out in the open!

~~~
dlwdlw
Agreed. Though I'd add that objectivism itself pursued and achieved as an end
goal successfully , opens blind spots as well especially to things like
heuristics and intuition. Basically anywhere where models don't exist or are
too flaky. The IKEA effect as a weakness should be about letting go of ego as
a virtue rather than objectiveness as a virtue.

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mattgreenrocks
I'd hoped the author would talk more about how cobbling an app together from
30 different npm packages is a wholly different experience from using only a
few and designing the code to model the problem being solved, rather than
being forced into a solution by your dependencies. The distinction is subtle
but real. I submit that great software must be designed.

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bambax
The antidote to that is to think about code as a draft. All code is a draft,
one attempt among many, to solve a problem. A draft is a step to the future. A
prototype of sorts.

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theparanoid
Code is a liability. A light bulb went off when I first heard that.

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empath75
I thought this would be about consumer software that forces the end user to
'assemble' it someway, which would have been a super interesting essay.

