alt Hacker NewsYou're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it to drive business value and make a profit. You did so effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled. So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better?
How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it by hand?
Replies
Why would I give a rat’s ass what my CEO thinks. I do my job the way I want to in a way that allows me to keep going. If the CEO wants it a different way he can fire me, and pay me 10 months worth of wages while I look for a different job.
I know the code I produce is damn good, and I take pride in my extremely low defect rate. I will not be rushed. I will not be pushed. And I will do so until the day I retire.
My CEO is fine as long as the project is profitable, which is part of my responsibility, and they are actually on board with us delivering the best quality we can under that constraint, not only because our clients do notice quality, but also as a matter of principle.
It’s not just about speed today. It’s about the speed to make changes, to understand the minutia of the code to more quickly troubleshoot when something goes wrong, to better understand the implication of future changes…
Just yesterday I was on a call where someone was trying to point to my code as a problem when we suspected a DNS issue. If I didn’t know the code inside and out, I could have easily been steam rolled, because as we know, “it’s never the network”. We found out today it was in fact DNS.
If someone only ever worries about is speed, they’ll likely get tripped up and fall. One guy on my team is all about delivering quickly. He gives very optimistic timelines and gets things out the door as fast as possible. Guess what, the code breaks. He is constantly getting bug reports from everyone and having to fix stuff. As he continues to run into this, he is starting to become a bit more mature and tactical, but that is taking time.
I think the CEO would much rather see the production code be fully tested and stable. I write the frameworks everyone else on the team uses. If my code breaks, everyone’s code is broken. How much will that cost?