Comment by MobiusHorizons
9 months ago
> instead it presents what look like rules that you shouldn't be breaking if you want to be a good programmer.
I see this a lot, especially among more junior programmers. I think it likely stems from insecurity with taking responsibility for making decisions that could be wrong. It makes sense, but I can’t help but feel it is failing to take responsibility for the decisions that are the job of engineering. Engineering is ultimately about choosing the appropriate tradeoffs for a specific situation. If there was a universally “best” solution or easy rule to follow, they wouldn’t need any engineers.
I always think of this as the programmer version of "No one got fired for choosing IBM." that was a common phrase about executives back in the day. Do the thing that you can just point to "experts" and blame them.
That is a helpful comparison. I guess it is risk aversion at the core. At some point risk aversion becomes abdication of decision making to others, which seems broken in roles that are specifically hired for making decisions, but that’s even more true of executives.
I completely agree with you, mind I feel the same way about the people who the original comment was talking about. They are paid the big bucks to decide how to spend money to optimize the company.