Comment by idiotsecant
2 days ago
This is a wildly unprofessional attitude. Programmers are craft(wo)men. They employ their craft toward creating things people pay them to create.
We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement. The job doesn't exist to give you emotional fulfillment. A mason doesn't insist that a client who needs a warehouse must pay him to spend a week detailing corbelled brick cornices. He makes a CMU wall, in the cheapest and most efficient way that still gets the job done.
It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order. That was one of the hardest lessons I learned as a fresh engineer and I see so often others that are just learning it. Sometimes people never learn it.
> We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement.
Sure, but in plumbing - or any trade - there is a huge spectrum of quality of work. Tons of little details add up that confer the person’s skill level to anyone checking it out in the future.
> It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order.
When I insist that something must be done a certain way, it’s not for my ego, it’s because I know that a year from now, I will be called upon to fix it during an incident if I don’t do it right this time. I am so absolutely sick of hacky bandaids being thrown on the ever-increasing pile of tech debt. To me, it’s profoundly disrespectful when product tells engineering that yet again, they will not yield time to fix the backlog, and to ship New Feature X.