Comment by ryandrake
12 hours ago
While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is.
When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.
Precisely this. We love to put our colleagues as competent victims of the system, but a competent engineer is unlikely to build an embeeded UI with high latency at their first try. It's a combination of cheap, underqualified labour and careless management.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”
Certainly one of the benefits of my "Fuck Off Fund" is that for a good many years now it has enabled me to be unburdened by concerns about whether I might get fired for saying what I think to management.
I'm at much lower risk than the imagined target of the "Fuck Off Fund" concept for things like inappropriate sexual contact or coercive control, but I find it really does lift a weight off you to know that actually I don't have to figure out whether I can say Fuck Off. The answer to that is always "Yes" which leaves only the question of whether I should say that. Sometimes I do.
And you know, on zero occasions so far have I been fired as a consequence of telling management to fuck off. But also, I had to think hard about that because, thanks to the fund, I had never worried about it. I've been fired (well, given garden leave, same thing) but I have no reason to think it's connected to telling anybody to fuck off.
This is only partially true.
If developers prioritize customer experience instead of velocity and cost in situations where that isn't warranted, the company they work for can no longer sell products as cheaply as their competitors do. This decreases their market share and their revenue, which means they'll employ fewer developers in the future.
This is almost an evolutionary process, many (but not all) markets choose for developers which don't care about such things.
You mean the developer hired by (and fired by) management?
> When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared.
No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to improve "quality" gets fired.
We have no labor power because morons spent the good times insisting that we don't need a professional organization to solve the obvious collective action problem.
The idea that workers are not responsible for their own competence or the quality of their work output is such a bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush your teeth, either, so why do we do it?
Nobody here is writing that code.