The core of this argument is really about the emotional health of the workers.
An emotionally healthy person tends to want to maintain their environment. It doesn't do anything objective to have nice furniture and pretty paintings, but you like it in your house. You want to feel at peace, so you adjust little things...the kitchen would be nicer with the plates in a pile over here instead of just pulling them out of the dishwasher.
At work, you're the householder of a million technical details, and to feel good about it you want to maintain your environment! If that window has an ugly redraw you want to recode it, if the ribbon has big ugly icons you want to collapse it into a strip menu, if the email client freezes whenever WiFi gets spotty you get annoyed because the code is still from 1995 under the surface. The software you're making and using, in service to your own craft, has an effect on you. If it makes you feel ugly, you want to fix it.
This blog post -- which probably wasn't written on company time -- is here because someone needed to reorganize their thinking to feel emotional health. I think we should insist on doing a better job than just sacrificing our work to feed the money machine, even if our self-described jobs are just to turn funding into paychecks.
Precisely. I get not going overboard and being a perfectionist. One has to ship. But also, you should have SOME pride in your work. You should want to not make total shit.
An emotionally healthy person tends to want to maintain their environment. It doesn't do anything objective to have nice furniture and pretty paintings, but you like it in your house. You want to feel at peace, so you adjust little things...the kitchen would be nicer with the plates in a pile over here instead of just pulling them out of the dishwasher.
At work, you're the householder of a million technical details, and to feel good about it you want to maintain your environment! If that window has an ugly redraw you want to recode it, if the ribbon has big ugly icons you want to collapse it into a strip menu, if the email client freezes whenever WiFi gets spotty you get annoyed because the code is still from 1995 under the surface. The software you're making and using, in service to your own craft, has an effect on you. If it makes you feel ugly, you want to fix it. This blog post -- which probably wasn't written on company time -- is here because someone needed to reorganize their thinking to feel emotional health. I think we should insist on doing a better job than just sacrificing our work to feed the money machine, even if our self-described jobs are just to turn funding into paychecks.