Most of my colleagues are content to spend 50 hours chopping up the tree with a pipe. We don't have time to spend making things work properly! This tree has to be finished by tomorrow! Maybe after we've cut up this forest, then we'll have a bit of spare time to sharpen things.

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eddythompson80 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As Charlie Munger used to say “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”.

What are the incentives for these developers? Most businesses want trees on trucks. That’s the only box they care to check. There is no box for doing it with a sharp axe. You might care, and take the time to sharpen all the axes. Everyone will love it, you might get a pat on the back and a round of applause, but you didn’t check any boxes for the business. Everyone will proceed to go through all the axes until they are dull, and keeping chopping anyway.

I see 2 year old projects that are considered legacy systems. They have an insurmountable amount of technical debt. No one can touch anything without breaking half a dozen others. Everyone who worked on it gets reasonable rewarded for shipping a product, and they just move on. The business got its initial boxes checked and everyone who was looking for a promotion got it. What other incentives are there?

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IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not about incentives; it's just bad management. As you said, the business just wants trees on trucks, so good management would realise that you need to spend some time sharpening axes to get trees on trucks quickly. It just seems to be something that a lot of software managers don't get.

I don't think every company is like this though. E.g. Google and Amazon obviously have spent a mountain of time sharpening their own axes. Amazon even made an axe so sharp they could sell it to half the world.

	▲	argee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Early on in Amazon’s history (long before same day shipping), they added a feature that would tell you, on a product page, whether you had recently bought that same product. The metrics spoke loud and clear: it caused purchase count to go down. Human common sense about the customer’s experience overruled the data and they have some variation of that feature to this day. That’s the “customer obsession,” but unfortunately most businesses only copy the “data driven”.