On: Throw away your first draft of your code

[Mountain_Skies]

Just never let management see the prototype or they'll consider it done and tell you to move on to something else.

[shortcake27 → Mountain_Skies]

In my experience, this is what actually happens. A developer makes a low-quality, low-effort prototype under the assumption it won’t ship. Someone sees it. It gets shipped. Everyone loses.

[jstarfish → shortcake27]

Sabotage your prototypes then. Have it reset its state every 5 minutes or deliberately leak memory.

[gjvc → jstarfish]

Sneaky move.... but then, in the eyes of some people, you might well appear not competent to put together a working system, so make sure you know your audience.

[sodapopcan → jstarfish]

Ya, this basically.

It helps if you have tests because when prototyping, you can write things in a way which break tests and ideally break other features. It works enough that you can validate the one idea. That way it will never pass CI.

[hyperthesis → jstarfish]

They are cunning. You cannot sabotage it enough to fool them.