
Living in the Age of Software Fuckery - tl
https://medium.com/@bryanedds/living-in-the-age-of-software-fuckery-8859f81ca877
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wtbob
I think that he's right about his facts but not necessarily about the spin he
puts on those facts. The thing is, it really is important to get stuff out the
door, and it's really _not_ important to have the best quality possible
(consider: how many of us have hand-stitched shirts from hand-woven cloth?).
Rather than fight those facts, I choose to embrace them: the challenge is to
ride the wave, to figure out the most economical way to produce the best
quality possible within one's constraints. That's pretty fun.

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mikerichards
To your point about getting software out the door. I've run into a type of
developer on more than one occasion that I call "refactoring kings".
Invariably, they're on the hunt for commits and how they can make it "better".
Of course any 20 lines of code has the possibility of being refactored
infinitely to a better state.

That said, the post was pretty spot-on, if a little tongue-n-cheek. The trick
is to know what battles to fight. I've recently come aboard a small team where
the main developer is more of a DBA than "coder", so there's lots of best
practices missing. But we're in a startup mode, and I don't have the time to
refactor the whole damn thing. If I see something egregious, I'll fix it, but
there's code battles that I'll defer for another day.

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rubyfan
I come across these types of "refactor kings" in most areas, not just on the
dev front but in architecture, business process improvement, etc. "Better"
seems to be like beauty (in the eye of the beholder).

I have tried to change the culture I work in to be more focused on quantifying
"better". This is difficult for software people especially, who cannot (or
will not) make the connection between their contribution and the overall
business.

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mikerichards
I enjoyed the post, but I'd like to play contrarian a bit more.

I see way to many developers with absolutely no sense of urgency. I'm not
talking about beating the drums of a death march, but at least envisioning the
finish line, instead of riding along for the process.

The bottom line is that when we're getting paid to write software, we're doing
it for an end-goal and not for the sake of agile/scrum.

